Annotated
to other sites and documents
Click on the (abbreviated) name of the website or document, in the
panel to the left, for an informal explanation of why it might be of special interest to somebody interested in Peirce.
Click on the gold bullet to the left before the name to go directly to the website or document.
You can
add your own suggestions [see just below] here as well: just provide the URL and your own explanation.
Suggestions, queries, and comments to
http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/links.htm
Links home section last modified by B.U. April 27, 2012,
earliest on June 30, 2011 — B.U.
Content last modified FEBRUARY 1, 2000 — J.R.
InteLex (Past Masters) Electronic Texts
This is the place to get the
Collected Papers of Peirce in electronic form, as well as a number of other collections of philosophical texts. (Click on the "title" button on the vertical bar on the left of the screen to go to the list of available materials.) The prices are good (not much more than a hundred dollars for the Collected Papers the last time I checked) and the quality of the text is always professional level as regards both skill and scholarly scruples. Get the WIN or MAC version rather than the DOS: the interface is
much better. If you have to choose between the eight-volume paper edition of the
Collected Papers (supposing you can find an available copy) and this electronic version, you will almost certainly want the latter if you are interested in the content rather than the wrapper, quite apart from the fact that the out-of-print CP now has a price of a thousand dollars on it! The digitally encoded text leaves the other in the dust as a scholarly tool.
UPDATE (B.U.) June 27, 2011. InteLex has shifted to an online model serving institutions but it may be worth it for individual customers from the CD-ROM days to contact InteLex. Among Peirce editions, InteLex has:
- The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce Volumes 1–8 (1931–1958)
InteLex Edition
- Published Works I consisting of Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to 'the Nation' Volumes 1–4 (1975–1987) and A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Published Works of Charles Sanders Peirce, 2nd edition (1986).
InteLex Edition
- Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volumes 1–6
InteLex Edition
Also note that the
Collected Papers is back
in print from Harvard, though at a cost of more than $1,000. END OF UPDATE
GO TO INTELEX WEBSITE
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#intelex
InteLex section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 27, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
The Visual Inference Laboratory
This is a well-developed scholarly website (at Indiana University) devoted to a couple of projects that were also of special importance to Peirce:
first, the graphical representation of inference structures and processes, and,
second, the thesis that mathematical reasoning and deduction in general involve appeal to the observation of diagrammatic figures ("iconic" representations, in Peirce's terminology) and cannot be reduced to purely symbolic (i.e. rule-governed) transformations. You will want to pay special attention to
Jon Barwise and his work in particular, as he is the leading figure in this, but may find it worthwhile to follow out the interests of all of his associates and students as well.
GO TO THE LABORATORY WEBSITE
(via the Wayback Machine)
or
Go back to LINKS home section
https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#vilab
V.I.L. section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 27, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
The Institute for Learning Technologies
(Columbia University)
This is one of the most promising visions of the future of education among those who might be in position to do something about it, and seems consistent with the philosophy of education both implicit and explicit in Peirce's work. Before visiting this unusually rich and complex site (at Columbia University), though, you might want to get the vision from Robert McClintock's paper on
learning as studying [via the Wayback Machine], and from Jen Hogan's beautifully crafted
Dante Project website, which is a part of it, developed as an exemplary place for study. (Jen is a member of the PEIRCE-L discussion forum.)
GO TO THE INSTITUTE WEBSITE
or
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#ilt
I.L.T. Section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 27, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
Alan D. Manning's Supposition Error Webpages
Alan Manning, a linguist and novelist, and an active participant in the discussion forum PEIRCE-L, has provided us with a portal to a fictional world in which Peirce is the daimonic or guiding spirit. It asks us to:
"Suppose that Peirce's theories are rediscovered, and become the basis for human civilization for the next thousand years.... How will
Paul Bolton, a TV addict but also a 20th-century humanist who has disavowed the
very concept of knowable truth, come to terms with Peirce's maxim?—"Truth
crushed to earth will rise again." (and again, and again, and again)—Bolton's only hope lies in the fact that truth is really no stranger to fiction"
This philosophical novel is presented to us through still another imaginative portal: a website that is itself a marvel of construction and content that introduces Peirce through his category theory at the same time that it provides an explanation and generous preview of Manning's novel. Be sure to click on the images that run across the top of the cover picture of his book to access the riches of the website.
GO TO MANNING'S SUPPOSITION ERROR HOME PAGE
or
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#manning
Manning section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 27, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
Kenneth Laine Ketner's His Glassy Essence
(Biography of Peirce)
After concluding, quite reasonably, that it is impossible to write a biography of Peirce that does justice to him, Ken Ketner decided to follow up on an idea that arose in conversation with Peirce enthusiast Walker Percy and write an autobiography of him instead. This link takes you to the
His Glassy Essence Website wyttynys.net, which tells you more about it and how to get a copy of it. (It's the first of a projected three volumes.)
GO TO HIS GLASSY ESSENCE WEBSITE
or
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#ketner
Ketner section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 27, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
Scientific American
Of special interest to many Peirce enthusiasts because of the connection between Peirce and the sciences—Peirce was a working research scientist (astronomy, geodesy, metrology) with a higher degree in chemistry—but also worth visiting because of the quality of the website itself as exemplary of the way a traditional paper magazine can establish an on-line presence without compromise in either direction. It just takes a generosity of spirit—the portion of the paper edition that is simultaneously made available on-line is substantial and not a mere teaser—and enough money to fund the elaborate encoding of some of the material made available in this way.
GO TO SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
or
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#sciam
Sciam section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 30, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
"The Discovery of the Top Quark",
by Tony Liss and Paul Tipton
This account of an astonishingly complex social project of establishing that there is a certain sub-sub-atomic entity with certain properties, which involved more than 1000 signatories to the research report generated as the last phase of the project, suggests that the usual philosophical account of scientific knowledge in terms of the certainty of the individual person has become impertinent. On the positive side, it also suggests that any account of knowledge that takes the results of scientific inquiry duly into account must involve recognition that such undertanding is socially distibuted, is a resultant of a communicational process, and has more to do with common acceptance than with individual conviction. It seems, in any case, to be a corroboration of Peirce's idea that science is best understood as a collaborative form of life and this or that particular science is of the nature of a communicational community unified by a common interest in finding out about something. The account of the particular discovery of concern here includes a very helpful and suggestive account of the collaborative activity that was involved in writing up a research report that would be acceptable to all who participated in the experimentation.
GO TO QUARK PAPER (PDF)
(chez Tony M. Liss)
or
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#quark
Quark section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 27, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
The Architectonics of Nature:
A Freshman Seminar at Princeton
A quote from the home page:
We are members of the Princeton University class of 1999. This website is the final project of a spring term freshman seminar entitled "The Architectonics of Nature", taught by Professor Clarence Schutt of the Chemistry Department.
Peirce is one of several philosophers discussed—the others are Kant, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Popper—and there are several short pages devoted to Peirce in particular; but it is the website as a whole which is especially noteworthy and worth exploring at your leisure, both for its content and for its value as an example of what can be done pedagogically with the web.
GO TO SEMINAR WEBSITE
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#nature
A. of N. Section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 30, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
Cybernetics and Human Knowing:
A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, & Cyber-Semiotics
Edited by Søren Brier, the idea is apparently to focus in a meta-disciplinary way on the articulation of an overall perspective shift appropriate to the structures of understanding being created by the new information and communication technologies: "A basic feature of this work is the attempt to integrate scientific thinking with ethical and aesthetic perspectives in both theory and practice, in an attempt to bridge what C.P. Snow called 'The Two Cultures'." The site—unusually pleasing aesthetically—contains some informative reviews of the journal, the tables of contents of all issues to date, subscription information, and quite a substantial number of fulltext on-line papers as well as abstracts, and may be aiming at making all of its past papers available on-line in due time.
[NOTE from B.U.: Here is a
link to the Wayback Machine's copy of the journal website in 1998 when Joseph Ransdell wrote the above. Unfortunately the images were not preserved. Historical note: the journal's subtitle at that time was "A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics & Cyber-Semiotics"; later added was the word "Autopoiesis".]
GO TO THE JOURNAL WEBSITE
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#cyber
C.&H.K. section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on August 6, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
HYLE: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry, 4-1, May 1998
Several of the papers in this journal (see the earlier volumes as well) suggest a possible role for semiotical analysis in application to the conceptions of the chemists, though it seems that the philosophy of chemistry knows of semiotic thus far only in the form of semiology. It is very suggestive material for somebody with a basis in semiotical conceptions to work from, though, and the material is philosophically interesting in other respects, too. Since Peirce was himself a chemist, the question naturally arises as to the extent to which his semiotical conceptions and perhaps his graphical logic as well may have some interesting origins in the rich iconographical traditions in chemistry, which go back into alchemical and occultist sources.
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#hyle
Hyle section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 27, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
Jonathan Schull,
"William and the World Wide Web"
Schull, a biological psychologist, has perceived something in William James which has gone unnoticed—or at least largely unappreciated—before, namely, the extent to which James's thought is based in his own special way of construing the import of natural selection for the theory of mind and self and—his special focus in this paper—the possible significance of this for understanding the potentialities of the world wide web. There is
another paper [via the
Wayback Machine] available on the web which develops the theoretical basis more extensively, with much pertinent quotation from the
Principles of Psychology and other relevant works of James.
GO TO SCHULL'S PAPER
(via the Wayback Machine)
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Schull section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 27, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content August 26, 1998 — J.R.
Edward Remler's
"Physics, Metaphysics, and Pedagogy"
A contemporary physicist's diagnosis of the problem of teaching physics to "poets", meaning people who cannot reasonably be expected to become physicists in order to understand what they should about physics. Is it a Peircean view? Not derived from Peirce, certainly, but here is Remler's conclusion:
The one thing that certainly can be done is to make students conscious of the viewpoints and problems discussed here. They should be told about the reality of physicists' supersensible reality. How it is perceived through mathematics and why its claims to reality are as valid and uniquely determined as those of the ordinary sort. They should be given a larger sense of what mathematics' role is in human thought so that they do not automatically assume that, since physics is writ in the language of mathematics, it necessarily provides an intrinsically impoverished or unnatural view of nature. They should be told of the grand concept of the world as the evolution of an idea, and of what this implies in terms of universal applicability of scientific law to all parts of existence.
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Remler section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 30, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
Jerry Fodor,
"The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism"
A critical review (for the
London Review of Books) of Steven Pinker's
How the Mind Works and Henry Plotkin's
Evolution in Mind that sketches out with economy and wit a helpful critical frame for understanding the latest craze in "cognitive science" and—incidentally and not too obtrusively—for understanding something about Fodor's own "nativism". None of this is from a Peircean perspective, but Fodor is a master of "state of the art" sketches as perceived from the mainstream of U.S. academic philosophy. It might also provide some hints at strategy for the critical assessment of other varieties of extended Darwinism that are currently flourishing, such as e.g. in the recent popular writing of Edward O. Wilson or the increasingly numerous and diverse applications of "genetic algorithms" in computational modeling of cognition.
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#fodor
Fodor section modified by B.U. August 13, 2011,
earliest on June 30, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
Charles E. Phelps, "The Future of Scholarly Communication: A Proposal for Change"
A useful document for sharpening one's understanding of Peirce's conception of a science by considering a conception opposed to his which, however, shares in common with his view the understanding of a science as primarily an association of persons. The conception of science implicit in this recent proposal is of people bound together by allegiance to what Peirce would call "the method of authority" inasmuch as it is essentially a proposal to establish discipline-based central committees, constituted initially by people selected by the proposers or those in agreement with them (who else?), whose task is to grade academic research papers, certifying them as recognized officially as being fit or unfit to print, providing thereby a basis for developing cumulative profiles of individual researchers as competent or incompetent, and to what extent, for purposes of controlling hiring, tenure, promotion, grant applications, and so forth. Let me underscore that this is
not Peirce's view, but it is well worth reading closely to see what is at stake in how science is conceived.
GO TO PHELP'S PAPER (Wayback Machine)
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Phelps section last modified by B.U. May 10, 2012,
earliest on June 30, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
Joshua Lederberg, "Options for the Future"
Lederberg is a scientist of high repute (a Nobel Prize in connection with the discovery of DNA) who has had special interest in the communicational dimension of science and regards the publication process, and the moral norms governing it, as of central importance in it: in short, an essentially Peircean conception of science, though derived from his own critical reflection on the practice of it. In this paper he addresses questions about the relationship of traditional publication practices to the new practices and possibilities on the internet.
GO TO LEDERBERG'S PAPER
or
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https://www.cspeirce.com/links.htm#lederberg
Last modified by B.U. November 25, 2023,
earliest on June 30, 2011 — B.U.
Last modified in content June 30, 1998 — J.R.
