The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vol. I 1857-1866 (review)

494 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~2:4 OCT ~984 are perhaps too many small faults: some slippage of tense (e.g., 36; n.t, 143) and shift of number (e.g., 19o); some renderings are needlessly free (thus, rechtliche Zufiilligkeiten may amount to much the same as "a matter of indifference so far as rights are concerned" (l ~5), but the latter is simply not a translation of the former). So far as I could determine, however, no serious misunderstandings result. It is well known that the English term "right" (for RechO has subjective connotations and lacks the very ambivalence that Ritter counts upon. But we have here an unbridgeable difference of social experience between the two linguistic groups. The reader might bear in mind that the impact of economic and social liberalism is reflected much more in the English term than in the German. The decision to translate Sache as "object of the will," however, is less inevitable. To be sure, the German term is the bane of translators into English, and in choosing to render the term in this way the translator certainly makes Ritter's interpretation clear, but at the cost of the broader associations of the term. The term is used technically in the "Logic of Essence" on the way from Grund to Existenz, and not first (as may be suggested at page x) in the "Logic of the Concept." In the Science of Logic, Bk. ~, Sec. l, c.3, Sache designates the totality of the determinations of a content or subject-matter that emerges into external existence. What we see in logical terms there, viz., the emergence of the entire order of "existence/appearance," becomes in the Philosophy of Right, paragraphs 42-43, the emergence of a whole new order of civil society, i.e., the autonomous sphere of private interest. In logical terms, the conditions, which were hitherto lying outside the ground, are now taken up into it. In the sphere of civil right, this means that nature---conceived as merely standing over against and outside of the social being of man (nur dinglich--is now taken up through human labor to become property within the self-determining sphere of modern civil society. If "object of the will" is too narrow to encompass all the associations of the term Sache, there is no doubt that it does get this central thesis of Ritter's interpretation across. It is an interpretation that merits the wider reading it can now receive, thanks to the editor of the series and the translator of the volume. KENNETH L. SCHMITZ University of Toronto The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vol. i i857-I866. Max H. Fisch, General Editor; Christian J. W. Kloesel, Edward C. Moore, and Don Roberts, Associate Editors, Lynn A. Ziegler, Textual Editor; Norma P. Atkinson, Research Associate. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Pp. xxv & 698. $32.5o, cloth. This is the excellent first of a projected twenty-volume chronological edition of some of Peirce's published and unpublished writings. Both The National science Foundation and The National Endownment for the Humanities funded this project, and the Modern Language Association endorses the final product under its standards set for aOOK REVIVWS 495 the publication of critical editions. Certainly, if this first volume is representative of what will follow in the remaining nineteen volumes, this will be as fine a chronological edition of anyone's work as has ever been published. Under the general editorship of Max Fisch, the skill, the sensitivity, the attention to fine detail and the overall scholarly care with which the editors have done their work is manifest with every turn of the page. It is nothing less than the first-rate edition America's finest philosopher deserves. As E. C. Moore (the Director of the Peirce Edition Project and one of the Associate Editors) tells us in the Preface, the primary aim of this chronological edition is to facilitate the study of the historical development of Peirce's thought. The thesis inspiring this chronological approach is simply that we cannot understand the positions Peirce finally reached if we do not understand the problems he discovered along the way and...