Joseph Ransdell and the Communicational Process of Philosophy

In the last decades of his life, Joseph Ransdell experimented with the communicational process of philosophy with the use of recent technological developments and envisioning what he called a telecommunity, a world-wide community centered especially on the ideas of Charles S. Peirce. To this end he created the Arisbe website and the peirce-l email forum thereby facilitating Peircean scholarship via the Internet. At the same time Ransdell continued his own philosophical investigations into such topics as the sign’s determination by the object, and iconicity in relation to the symbol. While Ransdell’s vision of a growing telecommunity has not yet been fully realized, it is alive and well, and remains an exciting challenge for those interested in continuing his truly prescient experiment.