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Reviewed by:
  • The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce ed. by Cornelis de Waal, Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski
  • W. A. Mitchell
The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce. Edited by Cornelis de Waal and Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 321 pp. $45 cloth.

In eleven first-rate essays, the normative thought of C. S. Peirce is not just exegetically exhumed from out of a sprawled corpus, a challenging task in its own right, but actually resuscitated to new life to address contemporary concerns. The goal of this collection is stated simply by de Waal and Skowronski in their introduction. Because there are “an increasing number of people . . . beginning to look at what Peirce has to offer more generally to contemporary esthetics and moral philosophy . . . this volume will prove a valuable starting point for this [interest]” (xii). While this volume is valuable and a successful contribution to Peirce studies, it is by no means a starting point for this kind of elaboration of Peirce’s philosophy. The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce was preceded in time and purpose by endeavors such as Vincent Potter’s monograph Charles S. Peirce on Norms and Ideals (1967); Peirce and Value Theory: On Peircean Ethics and Aesthetics (1994), edited by Herman Parrett, a collection which came out of the Sesquicentennial International Congress of 1989; and an edited volume by Kenneth Laine Ketner called Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquires (1995); to name no others. While not acknowledging all such scholarly precursors, it is apparent, nonetheless, that this volume has fully absorbed at least two important lessons from previous attempts to reconstruct Peirce’s perspective on the normative sciences.

First, the organization of Normative Thought is entirely appropriate. It does not merely thematically group the contributing essays into esthetics, ethics, [End Page 275] and logic but sets them out in just that order. While not conceived as a linear progression, Peirce did, however, claim that esthetics was foundational for both ethics and logic and that logic itself was deeply dependent on ethics, if not a kind of ethical practice (Essential Peirce 2:260). Working from this basic structure, the volume is then able to excellently demonstrate just how interdependent the normative sciences are in Peirce’s thought. (However, it should be noted that the eleven essays are unevenly distributed: two essays on esthetics, five essays on ethics, three on logic, and a final, broader essay on metaphysics and/as ethics.)

Second, and more importantly for this reviewer, the volume recognizes that all efforts to deal with the normative thought of C. S. Peirce are thwarted, first and foremost, by Peirce himself (Essential Peirce 2:29–41). There are at least four ways that the written works of the American logician, scientist, and philosopher can thwart volumes like this one. How these challenges are met provides one way to determine the quality and relative success of a given volume. I will briefly name the four challenges and then present how I see these essays actually addressing them, or not, as the case may be. First, there is the fact that Peirce made disparaging and occasionally hostile remarks against the normative sciences, even downplaying his own esthetic sensibilities. Second, there is a pronounced intellectual development in Peirce with regard to his views on esthetics, ethics, and logic, which emerged over the course of a lifetime of un/published work found in numerous literary outlets. Third, there are tensions surrounding the practical applicability of Peirce’s normative ideas, considering, in particular, his highly theoretical (re)articulations of logic and ethics. Finally, there is the challenge of dealing with the ultimate place and status of the normative sciences in light of Peirce’s evolutionary cosmology and metaphysics. In the end, the essays in this volume deal best with the second and the third challenges while largely ignoring the fourth.

Contributors to this volume enact at least three different approaches to meet these challenges. It is warranted, despite some instances of overlap, to recategorize the essays according to these strategies, or what I call the tasks of internal elucidation, proximate engagement, and contemporary application, respectively. The first group, committed to “internal elucidation,” includes the essays by James...

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