Reading Circle: Peirce’s Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism [Public]

Description

This reading circle will conduct a programmatic reading of Charles Sanders Peirce’s seven lectures on pragmatism, delivered at Harvard University in 1903 (and, written the same year, his “Sundry Logical Conceptions”).   These lectures provide the most systematic and coherent presentation of Peirce’s thinking in a succinct package.  All the selected texts are available in the second volume of The Essential Peirce.  Through these seven lectures, we will be able to explore Peirce’s phaneroscopy (or phenomenology—that is, his doctrine of the three categories), his metaphysics, conception of science and especially normative science, his semiotics, and his pragmaticism.  We will read one lecture per week.  This should average out to roughly 16-17 pages of reading per week.

Peirce is a very challenging but also very important figure—both for many reasons.  A close but slow reading of these lectures will, I believe, help us all better to understand his thinking.  Moreover, we will see how he conceived of the intimate unity between thinking (including the speculative) and acting.

We will meet from the week of July 6 through the week of August 31 (i.e., ending September 6).  Discussion sessions will be held throughout the week.