Call for paper 2024

NOEMA 15 (2024): Call for Papers

Across Disciplines: Charles Sanders Peirce Polymath

2024 will mark the 110th anniversary of the death of Charles Sanders Peirce, often considered the greatest of all American philosophers. Peirce is the father of philosophical semiotics and pragmatism – or rather pragmaticism, the term he used to distinguish his thought from the philosophy of other pragmatists of his time. He was also a brilliant logician and mathematician. Logic, philosophy, metaphysics, theory of inquiry, theory of categories, analysis of signs and interpretants: Peirce’s scope encompassed all these different domains and more. He also dealt with other disciplines: from linguistics (including comparative linguistics) to the philosophy of economics, from philology to theology and psychology, from topology to the logic of vagueness, from the history of science to geodetic and photometric studies, including chemistry, physics, astronomy, evolutionary biology, diagrammatic thinking, history, universal languages, and so on and so forth. It is not surprising that Peirce has been called “the American Leibniz”. No thinker after him– in America or in Europe – came close to this encyclopedic mind. Inspired by these reflections, this Call for Papers for Noema’s 2024 issue welcomes contributions that focus on the following aspects of Peirce’s thought:
1) Peirce considered philosophy as an attitude capable of transcending the boundaries of disciplines, like a mole capable of tunnelling through walls and borders, searching for “how to clear our ideas” (Peirce 1982-2009: 3). He used a single method to understand the multiformity of knowledge: it was the pragmatist method, which had to be tested in every sphere of knowledge (i.e. mathema, according to the etymology of the term “polymath”) (Peirce 2022). Peirce’s aim was not merely to demonstrate logical consistency, but the fruitfulness, future and pragmatic value of any theoretical assumption, whatever it might be. This can be inferred from the various possible interpretations of Peirce’s writings and manuscripts (Peirce 2009, Bergman 2010). The question then arises: did Peirce ever define the nature of this transdisciplinary perspective? Did he realise that this was not just his own personal inclination, but rather a powerful, and even for his times “untimely”, theoretical approach? For Peirce, according to the current distinction between the two terms, “transdisciplinary” was not the same as “interdisciplinary” (Barry and Born 2013, Cambria 2021, Parravicini 2021).
2) How can the main theoretical innovations of the logician, semiotician and philosopher Peirce be reread from these assumptions? There are those who say that the pragmatic maxim was inspired by his chemical and, more broadly speaking, scientific studies (Gronda R. - Janack M. - Marchetti G. 2024), and that Peirce imagined the fruitfulness of the theory of relatives after reflecting on the non-Aryan syntax of certain languages (Brioschi 2020). Again, there are those who speculate that the studies on iconicity and indexicality were guided by the scientific practice Peirce used in his work as an operator of an astronomy and geodesy agency at the time (Peirce 1982: Vol. IV and Gronda R. - Janack M. - Marchetti G. 2024 eds, Grespi 2023). And did the experience of the psychophysics laboratory where he was joined by Joseph Jastrow have any effect on his philosophy of consciousness, or was it more so his study of Fechner's psychophysics (Cristalli 2017)? How much other research, among the most important in the strictly philosophical field, was innervated by Peirce's experiments and laboratory practices as a scientist, a technician, a specialist in non-philosophical fields?
3) Still starting with Peirce, but also beyond Peirce, what horizon opens up for current research if we assume the point of view of transdisciplinarity (Cambria, Sini 2022, Hadorn et al. 2008)? Can we, dwarfs on the shoulders of this incomparable giant, Renaissance-like genius and multifaceted mind, still try to train ourselves to think beyond sectorial fences? And what becomes philosophy once it abandons its claims to universality and limits itself to focusing on 'luminous details' that only highlight chromatic intensities in the web of discourses - philosophical, artistic, scientific - that unite the humanity of our time (Sini 2020)?

Guidelines for submitting papers

To submit an article see the “Information for authors” and register on the website. Each article must be anonymous, with only the title, and must strictly follow the editorial criteria described in the “Information for authors”  section. The procedure requires an abstract of approximately 1000 characters (in Italian and English) and 5-10 keywords (in Italian and English). From the publication of this call for papers until the deadline of 31 May 2024, texts and related materials can be uploaded on the website in one of the following formats: .doc, .docx, .odt.  In the days following the submission of the proposal (usually within two to three weeks), you will receive a notification regarding the possible start of the peer review process, which will be carried out in "blind" mode. Therefore, when uploading your proposal to the journal's website, please submit your paper anonymously so that it can be sent for review. The author will only enter his or her name in the form to be filled in on the website during the guided process. On average, each article is published approximately three months after the review process has begun, although this may vary from case to case.

References 
Barry A., Born G. (eds). 2013. Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences. New York: Routledge.
Bergman M. 2010. “Serving Two Masters: Peirce on Pure Science, Useless Things, and Practical Applications.” In M. Bergman, A.V. Pietarinen, and H. Rydenfelt (eds.), Ideas in Action: Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference. Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 1. Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network: 17–37.
Brent J. 1993. Charles S. Peirce: A Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2ª ed., 1998. Brioschi M. R. 2020. “For a New Logic of the Proposition: Peirce and the Concept of ‘Rhema’”, Blityri IX, 2: 23–45.

Cambria F. 2021. “Per una formazione transdisciplinare”. In Id. (ed.), Le parti, il tutto,. Milan: Jaca Book. Cambria F. (ed.). 2022. Il sapere dei saperi. Per una formazione transdisciplinare, Milan: Jaca Book.
Cristalli C. 2017. “Experimental Psychology and the Practice of Logic. Charles S. Peirce and the Charge of Psychologism, 1869-1885”, in European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IX: 1.
Fabbrichesi R. 2019 “Spinoza, Emerson, and Peirce rethinking the genealogy of Pragmatism”. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 55, 2: 103–118. Grespi B. 2023. “Archaeology of post-photography”, in La valle dell’Eden, n. 41.
Gronda R., Janack M., Marchetti G. (eds). 2024. Pragmatism and Philosophy of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Routledge: London (forthcoming).
Hadorn H. G., Hoffmann-Riem H., et al. (eds). 2008. Handbook of Transdisciplinary Research. Cham: Springer. Menand L. 2001. The Metaphysical Club: a story of ideas in America. London: Flamingo.
Parravicini A. 2021. “Riflessioni su interdisciplinarietà e transdisciplinarietà”. In Cambria F. (ed.) Le parti, il tutto. Milan: Jaca Book: 315–25.
Peirce C. S. 1982-2009. Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition. Volumes 1–8, ed. by the “Peirce Edition Project”. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Peirce C. S. 2009. The Logic of Interdisciplinarity: The Monist-Series. Ed. Elize Bisanz. Berlin: Academie Verlag GmbH.
Peirce C. S. 2022. Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Writings. Ed. Matthew E. Moore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pietarinen, A-V., 2006. “Interdisciplinarity and Peirce’s classification of the sciences: A Centennial Reassessment”, Perspective on Science, vol. 14, n. 2: 127-152.
Sini C. 2020. Idioma. Milano: Jaca Book.
For further references, see: www.peirce.unimi.it: Peirce Research Group- Resources- Annotated Bibliography- Peirce and the sciences.