• June 2009 (PDF)
• Geo-Thought Symposium
• The Peirce Project, Montreal
  
• The Peirce Project, Bamberg
• Paul Weiss's Surrogates

Dedication of the Peirce Geodetic Marker

On 2 April 2004 the Peirce geodetic marker, located near the Peirce Edition offices, was dedicated. The program can be viewed here. A video of the proceedngs is available on DVD.

The Peirce-Wittgenstein Research Group...

of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) has recently received an important three-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to help it edit volume 7 of the Writings in collaboration with the Peirce Edition Project. W7 will contain a selection of the articles written by Peirce for the Century Dictionary & Cyclopedia (CD) mostly during the period 1883-1889. The group, founded in 1996 and directed since then by François Latraverse (Department of Philosophy), will not only examine closely the work that Peirce devoted to the CD, it will also develop a Peirce lexicon on the basis of the articles written for it (in particular those included in the two volumes of Supplements) and from other sources, as well as specialized vocabularies (Peirce on mathematics, Peirce on the history of philosophy, etc.).

For the past two years, the group has been working with limited financial means on some of the materials that are to be taken into account: all annotations by Peirce in his inlerleaved copy of the dictionary (Robin MS 1597) have been transcribed and transferred in a database, some of the relevant material of the MS has been treated and trips to the Houghton Library at Harvard are planned (the first in May 2003) to assess the exact content of the five boxes known as MS 1596. The project will also take into account all the materials related to the CD (correspondence, writings on lexicography by Peirce, etc.).

Jean-Guy Meunier (Philosophy, UQAM, specialist in the analysis of cognition and information), Mathieu Marion (Philosophy, UQAM, philosophy of logic and mathematics), Paul Forster (Philosophy, University of Ottawa), Martin Lefebvre (School of Cinema, Concordia University) and Paul Pupier (Linguistics, UQAM) are also involved in the project. A number of graduate students (in particular Marc Guastavino and David Lachance) have already begun working on the databases and various texts. The work will be done in close consultation with all members of the Peirce Project in Indianapolis. Associate editor André De Tienne, who is also a member of the UQAM project, serves as liaison.

The Peirce Edition Project (UQAM) is housed in room W-5505 of the Université du Québec à Montréal (Department of Philosophy), P.O. Box 8888, Succ. Centre-ville, Montreal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada. Other information can be found on the project web site or by contacting François Latraverse.

The Peirce Edition's New German Branch is Located in Bamberg.

Vol. 25 of the Writings, which will contain the Lowell Lectures of 1903 and the syllabus, will be edited by Helmut Pape in Germany. This body of manuscripts contains many of Peirce's most advanced writings on philosophy of science, logic and on the existential graphs. Recently a three-year grant by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - the German equivalent to the NEH - was given to Pape and to the Bamberg University.

In close contact with the Peirce Edition in Indianapolis, Pape's work will include directing the editorial process for the Lowell Lecture and writing an introduction for the volume. The grant provides money for two people collaborating with Pape and for the special equipment needed to carry out the task. The main editorial work will be done by Privatdozent Dr. Christian Strub, who teaches philosophy at the University of Hildesheim and who will receive a full time position. He has worked on theories of metaphor, ethics, and Peirce. Strub, who also holds a degree in Greek and Latin, has extensive experience in critical editing and has recently completed an edition of manuscripts by the medieval philosopher Abelard. Dr. Justus Lentsch, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Bielefeld, will fill a part-time position. Lentsch recently completed his Ph.D. with Pape with a dissertation on normative and structural logical aspects of Peirce's pragmatism. He will be in charge of the logical and mathematical topics in the Lowell Lecture and will take care of the computer problems of the project.

This German team has worked for a couple of years on the grant and will move soon into its quarters in Bamberg, within an impressive nineteenth-century mansion (Peirce Edition, University of Bamberg, Jaeckstr. 3, D-96050 Bamberg). For further information contact Helmut Pape.

The latest book by Paul Weiss (1901–2002) has appeared:

Surrogates. Foreword by Robert Cummings Neville. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

From the Foreword: “The long journey from Reality [in 1938] to Surrogates has a nice irony. The first book is a straightforward attempt to describe what reality is in its metaphysical generality, with an extended defense of the Aristotelian law of contradiction, ‘x is-not non-x,’ which Weiss then called ‘theultimate category.’ The point of Surrogates is that just about everything is or stands for something else: (nearly) ‘every x is non-x’ (in some respect). No philosopher has brought to light and pondered life's complexity with open wonder more than Paul Weiss” (p. xv).