Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 8: 1890–1892

Preface

xi Preface Volume 8 in the chronological edition of the writings of Charles S. Peirce is part of a projected 30-volume series initiated in 1975 under the leadership of Max H. Fisch and Edward C. Moore. The edition is selective but comprehensive and includes all writings, on any subject, believed to shed significant light on the development of Peirce’s thought. The selections are edited according to the guidelines of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, and present a critical, unmodernized rendering of Peirce’s published and unpublished work in a clear text format. The “Essay on Editorial Theory and Method” provides a full discussion of the editorial procedures used in establishing the texts for this volume. There have been three refinements in presentation since volume production began thirty years ago. The first two volumes (1982, 1984) centered on the philosophical writings in logic and metaphysics that predominated in the development of Peirce’s thought during the early years of his career. Only the most significant technical papers appeared in these initial volumes. Beginning with volume 3 (1986), the selection process was broadened to include more of the scientific, mathematical, and historical writings that, along with his philosophical papers, document the development of his thought across an ever-widening range of disciplines throughout the rest of his life. The second stage of editorial refinement first appeared in volume 4 (1989) and involved presentation of the editorial material. Textual information was consolidated in the editorial apparatus for each selection, resulting in a clearer distinction between that apparatus and the content notes that precede it in its own section, along with the bibliography and the chronological list of Peirce’s manuscripts. Volume 5 (1993) was the last volume formatted by off-site printers ; presswork for volume 6 (2000) reflected in-house advances in computing technology and a third evolution in editorial presentation that both adapts and extends the bibliographical achievements of earlier scholars. The chronological catalogs now number Peirce’s writings in their order of composition year by year, after the style of the Burks catalog in Volume 8 of the Collected Papers, and manuscripts are now identified by their Robin numbers (for Harvard ’s Houghton Library collection) or by standard archive identifiers (for other collections). The preface to volume 6 and the introduction to volume 6’s chronological catalog provide a full explanation of the manuscript references now in use. Preface xii Publication of consecutive chronological volumes will continue to be the backbone of the series, but the Peirce Edition Project’s continuing shift toward parallel volume editing sometimes leads to out-of-sequence publication for special volumes in the series. The present volume reflects the first stage of this transition. Volume 8 covers the period from the spring of 1890 to mid-summer 1892 and continues directly from the period covered by volume 6 (fall 1886 to spring 1890). Peirce’s wide-ranging work preparing or refining thousands of definitions for the Century Dictionary spans both volume periods, but it is too vast to be represented adequately in either; the general chronological sequence will be bridged at a later date by volume 7, which will be devoted to the lexicographical work that occupied Peirce as much as any other project principally during the late 1880s and early 1890s, and then intermittently over a dozen more years. The Preface to volume 6 prepared readers for this slight departure from the strict chronological production and outlined our plan to prepare volume 7 out of sequence. Since then, Indiana University’s Peirce Edition Project has formed an editorial partnership with what has now become the “Projet d’Édition Peirce” at the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) to prepare volume 7’s dictionary texts. Under the direction of Professor François Latraverse, the PEP-UQAM faculty and staff editors have been working under two successive grants awarded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to identify, transcribe, edit, and lay out the definitions preserved in Peirce’s Harvard papers. Scholars affiliated with the University of Bamberg, working under a similar government grant awarded to Professor Helmut Pape by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, worked for several years on the 1903 Lowell Lectures and managed to both organize and transcribe their entire manuscript base; the result of their work will prove of considerable assistance when the Project eventually begins preparing and editing volume 22. Project editors assume...