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Semiotics and Philosophy in Charles Sanders Peirce
Editor: Rossella Fabbrichesi and Susanna Marietti
Date Of Publication: Apr 2006
Isbn13: 9781904303749
Isbn: 1904303749
The subject of this book is the thought of the American pragmatist and founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce. The book collects the papers presented to the International Conference Semiotics and Philosophy in C.S. Peirce (Milan, April 2005), together with some additional new contributions by well-known Peirce scholars, bearing witness to the vigour of Peircean scholarship in Italy and also hosting some of the most significant international voices on this topic. The book is introduced by the two editors and is divided into three sections, corresponding to the three main areas of the most interesting contemporary reflection on Peirce. Namely, Semiotics and the Logic of Inquiry (part I); Abduction and Philosophy of Mathematics (part II); Peirce and the Western Tradition. (part III). The analysis is carried out from a semiotic perspective, in which semiotics should not be understood as a specific doctrine but rather as the philosophical core of Peirce’s system. As we read in the introduction: “it is semiotics and philosophy or, rather, semiotics as philosophy and philosophy as semiotics, which emerge from a reading of these papers”.

Rossella Fabbrichesi is Professor of Hermeneutics at the State University of Milan, Italy. She has been studied Peirce since her Ph.D. in Philosophy, publishing La polemica sull’iconismo (1983); Sulle tracce del segno (1986); Il concetto di relazione in Peirce (1992); Introduzione a Peirce (1993). She edited two anthologies of Peirce’s writings: La logica degli eventi (1989); Categorie (1992).

She also worked on the link between Peirce and Wittgenstein (Cosa significa dirsi pragmatisti: Peirce e Wittgenstein a confronto, 2002; Peirce and Wittgenstein on Common Sense, 2004) and the connexions between both authors and the Leibnizian tradition (I corpi del significato. Lingua, scrittura e conoscenza in Leibniz e Wittgenstein, 2000; and, with F. Leoni, Continuità e variazione. Leibniz, Goethe, Peirce, Wittgenstein. Con un’incursione kantiana, 2005). Recently, she turned to the topic of a genealogy of sign in Greek thought (La freccia di Apollo. Semiotica ed erotica nel pensiero antico, 2006). She edits the first Italian web-site entirely devoted to Peirce (www.unimi.it/peirce/).

Susanna Marietti is a Post-Doctoral Researcher and Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan. After her earlier studies in formal logic, she became interested in the foundation of logic and mathematics, a topic she treats by making use of Peirce’s semiotics. Besides various essays on this subject, she authored a volume on Peirce’s philosophy of mathematics (Icona e diagramma. Il segno matematico in Charles Sanders Peirce, 2001), edited an Italian anthology of Peirce’s manuscripts (Pragmatismo e grafi esistenziali, 2003) and collaborated on the creation of the first Italian website dealing entirely with Peirce. She has also been conducting research on Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Susanna Marietti is the editor of various volumes on human rights and penal issues and belongs to the editorial board of Antigone, an Italian periodical on related subjects.

The authors are recognized scholars of Peirce, and their topics are varied so that the volume is well balanced in its variety.

The inclusion of Colapietro and Houser alone is evidence of the level of importance of the publication. It is a welcome addition to literature about Peirce. I am also especially impressed with Sini's discussion of semiotics and continuity, a topic on which I once focused.

The idea of tying in Peirce’s semeiotic with other aspects of his philosophy is an effort that has increasingly intrigued me for the past eight years or so.

Your book should be of interest to advanced students and professors of philosophy and semiotics in particular.

Carl R. Hausman

The book is both a wide-range survey on Peirce’s thinking in its semiotical, epistemological and logical aspects, and an assessment of his complex and multiple interests, which cover nearly all disciplines in the Western tradition.

Few collections of essays on Peirce have appeared in recent times and the community of Peirce’s scholars was in great need of an overview on the most debated questions and on the new directions taken by these studies.

I am thoroughly convinced that this collection shows very clearly the importance of studying Peirce today. From semiotics to psychology, from fallibilism to linguistic analysis, from the philosophy of mathematics to the classical, the medieval and the Kantian heritage on semiotics, it offers a new and fresh look on Peirce, pointing in myriad and startling directions.

Corrado Mangione,

Professor of Logic, University of Milan

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