Rossella Fabbrichesi

Iconic thought and diagrammatical scripture: Peirce and the Leibnizian tradition

Abstract I will sustain in this article that Peirce can be seen as the last great representative of that inconspicuous but persistent tradition that, from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, spent its energies on discovering a universal language. His project of Existential Graphs is in fact grounded on the isomorphism among a Sheet of Assertion, in which Graphs-signs are drawn, a Mind, with its thoughts-signs, and the Universe, with its facts-signs. In the same sense, Leibniz worked on his Characteristica Universalis, seen as a general Encyclopedia or alphabet of human thoughts, and a pictum mundi amphitheatrum.

Semiotics and the Something: A Pragmatist Perspective on the Debate on Realism

My intention in this paper is to contribute the debate on “realism” in order to raise a different sort of question: not whether ‘reality’ exists or does not exist, but rather what effects does the belief in this or that reality produce (as Peirce put it 150 years ago). I will turn to Eco’s later thought, and to his support for a form of ‘negative’ realism, and try to demonstrate how his appeal to Peirce’s distinction between Immediate and Dynamical Object is affected by a common-sense interpretation of what ‘real’ amounts to. Peirce in fact distinguished between the “existence” of facts and their “reality.” The former implies a dynamic of blind force, a dynamical reaction. Yet, “reality consists in the future” (CP 8.284), in the public recognition of what it always will be, or we hope will be, in the long run (Peirce uses the word “mellonization”). In Eco’s work, though, the Being or the Real, seen as pure Something, is understood after the form of a Thing, above all External, which simply says many ‘No’s. Peirce’s pragmaticism leads us further on, concentrating on the concept of habit that is also detectable in Eco’s analysis. We could say that Peirce distinguishes brute existence hic et nunc from the persistence of habits. Acts and dispositions to act, and not facts (as opposed to interpretations) appear as real; and it is in this respect that I think we can find a promising line of research for better explaining Eco’s theory of realism.

«Una vita non esaminata non vale la pena di essere vissuta». La filosofia nell’intreccio tra vita e sapere

L’articolo mette a confronto l’idea socratica della ricerca infinita come motivo ispiratore della filosofia (che si definisce qui zetetica) e l’idea, frequentata da Peirce e Wittgenstein in eta contemporanea, di un sapere legato alla pura descrizione della vita e delle sue forme pragmatiche, del piano dell’indubitabile certezza che fa da sfondo ad ogni evidenza guadagnata attraverso una critica rigorosa. Ci si chiede dunque come debba configurarsi oggi il metodo, la via, della filosofia, nell’intreccio tra vita vissuta e vita esaminata.

Esiste la coscienza? Le tesi inattuali di Peirce e James a confronto con la filosofia novecentesca.

Peirce considered consciousness, in his early 1868’s writings, as a mere result of an inferential process, arguing that we have no power of introspection and that the Self is built throughout a process of trial and error. Peirce considered consciousness as a sign effect, more than as the generative origin of the knowledge of the world and of the other living beings. In his later correspondence with James, at the beginning of the 20 th century, he affirmed that consciousness has to be considered not substantially, but phenomenologically, as “qualisense, altersense, medisense”, following the results of the phaneroscopic considerations developed in the part of his system called “High Philosophy”, or philosophy of experience. From his part, James opened his writings on radical empiricism with an essay entitled “Does consciousness exist?”, where he advanced some doubts about the constitutive and transcendental power of it, and proposed to consider consciousness just as a function, useful for some cognitive purposes. Pure experience is made of a same ‘stuff’, a same matter, that is the matter of thoughts and the matter of things, and they are just one in the simultaneity of their apparition. Consciousness is no more than an adaptive opportunity, among many others useful in our commerce with the world. Both the authors, therefore, preferred to speak of “a pure experience” based on habits of response, rather than of a pure consciousness. Consciousness in their system has no founding role, no psychological centrality, and no conceptual priority. This way, they inaugurate a stream of thought that was not prevalent in the 20 th century (think of Husserl’s or Sartre’s positions, for example), but that nowadays could help us in solving many philosophical puzzles, and in building a living dialogue between pragmatism and cognitive sciences.

Il significato del significato in Peirce e Wittgenstein

L’articolo analizza l’intreccio dei concetti di continuita, vaghezza e generalita in Peirce e il modo in cui Wittgenstein tratta le proposizioni e i significati vaghi. Nonostante la sua antipatia per ogni tipo di pragmatismo, Wittgenstein sembra molto vicino ad esso per quanto riguarda la definizione di significato, specialmente per quanto concerne il modo di considerare il significato come una pratica di riferimento vaga e inesatta, anche se perfettamente certa da un punto di vista pragmatico, proprio come sosteneva Peirce. Ci sono nozioni vaghe da un punto di vista logico, che conducono a una precisa modalita operativa quando entrano in frizione con il loro uso pratico.