Gary that strikes me as a useful hypothesis regarding the peirce-l intellectual landscape.
I’m so glad you will be facilitating a slow read of Stjernfelt’s new book. It is super-high on my reading list. I really enjoyed his presentation at the Peirce Congress about the structure of the proposition – suggesting that the subject term of the proposition signifies not just the object it is pointing to but “that it is pointing to that object”. Intriguingly deep. Cheers, Cathy *From:* Gary Fuhrman [mailto:[email protected]] *Sent:* Sunday, 27 July 2014 1:25 a.m. *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* [PEIRCE-L] Invigorating Philosophy with Natural Propositions List, Since the Peirce Centennial conference last week, i've been thinking about its explicit aim, “Invigorating Philosophy for the 21st Century”, and about the role of peirce-l in doing that. It seems to me that most subscribers to peirce-l occupy some space on a spectrum between two poles, which i'll describe here as personified ideals (meaning that no actual person is absolutely one or the other): the *Peircean scholar*, and the *peircean Philosopher*. The Ideal *Peircean scholar* participates in a largely professional community working toward a fully developed, pragmaticistic and widely shared understanding of Peirce's work as a whole. The PS regards that work as a single sign (namely an Argument) and a living system, every part of which is functional in the context of the whole. It follows that the critical study of any part contributes to the comprehension of the other parts *and* of the whole —so the specialists in this community have good reason to work together. The *peircean Philosopher* on the other hand is more philosophical than Peircean — that is, the PP participates in a community hoping to tell the Whole Truth (which, were it ever to arrive, would include its confession that it does not profess to be Exactly True.) The PP regards Peirce as another member of that philosophical community, one who fortunately has left abundant representations of his trains of thought in his published and unpublished work. We could say that PPs are *miners* of Peirce because in his work they find realizations that deserve to be replicated in the philosophical community, in many other human communities, and ultimately in the Earth community. So while the PS is after the Whole Truth *about Peirce*, the PP is mining Peirce for functional components of the Whole Truth (about life, the universe and everything, if we may use this language). As someone who gravitates toward the PP pole, i realize that some of those peircean components may need to be reformulated and revised in order to function better in other communities; indeed some of them are already functioning in other communities in formulations that owe nothing to Peirce. But i also realize that Peirce's work is more a network than a nest of nuggets. Pull on any of its strands of system hard enough, and you have to either take the whole thing on board (hoping it doesn't sink you) or be left with a bleeding chunk of “Peirce” on your hands, feeling like a thief. This should motivate us to work together with the PS community. Actually peirce-l, as i see it, is a single community with a common interest in Invigorating Philosophy for the 21st Century. Toward that end, it's been suggested that we might conduct a seminar of sorts to study Frederik Stjernfelt's new book *Natural Propositions*. I suggested this to Frederik at the Lowell conference and he’s keen on the idea. It will be organized in a similar way to our seminar on Kees de Waal’s book, in which each chapter was assigned a volunteer to start a thread on it and lead the discussion. We called these volunteers “emcees”, but since that’s a strange term to many readers who aren’t North Americans (as I learned at the Lowell conference), I’m going to call them Threadleaders. So this is a call for volunteers to let me know (offlist if you like) what part(s) of the Stjernfelt book you’d like to lead a thread on, and perhaps what would be the best time for you to do that, say between now and December. As before, this seminar can run concurrently with whatever else is happening on the list. I’ll assume that anyone interested in doing that probably has a copy of the book already, so I won’t list the table of contents here. If you haven’t seen the book yet, I recommend it because it exemplifies the virtues of *both* the Peircean scholar and the peircean Philosopher: that is, I think it gets Peirce right in the context of his system *and* places a crucial part of that system in a broader context — one which includes biosemiotics as well as logic, and develops the concept of iconicity to new levels. I’ll be happy to expand on this if anyone wishes, and in the meantime you can “look inside” the book at Amazon. Please come forward, prospective threadleaders! If you want to message me privately, just Reply to this and delete the peirce-l address from your “To:” field before you Send. gary f. } In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds. [Tao Te Ching 63 (Feng/English)] { www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ gnoxics
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