Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

To Peirce scholars and other aficionados of logic, semiotics, and pragmatism, 2017 brought the great news of Bellucci’s Speculative Grammar book, providing the eye-opening first detailed chronological overview over Peirce’s career-length developing of his semiotics. Now, the first volume of Ahti Pietarinen’s long-awaited three-volume publication of the totality of Peirce’s writings on his mature logic representation system known as Existential Graphs (EGs) not only gives us a plethora of hitherto unpublished Peirce papers but also a new and in many ways surprising view into the origin and development of this important fruit of Peirce’s last, creative philosophical burst taking its beginning around 1896, famously to peak in his annus mirabilis of 1903.

Ahti Pietarinen has spent an admirable effort not only to find, collect and transcribe the enormous amount of Peirce’s EG writings, but also to frame and comment the results in a planned three-volume, 2000-pages annotated edition named Logic of the Future (LoF). The book is simultaneously the first volume of a new de Gruyter series “Peirceana”, edited by Francesco Bellucci and Ahti Pietarinen. The title has been chosen from a 1909 letter to William James in which Peirce describes the EG system and exclaims: “This ought to be The Logic of the Future”.

Now, the first volume of this gargantuan work has appeared, subtitled “History and Applications”. A brief general introduction presents the layout of the whole planned edition, while another brief intro takes the uninitiated reader into the central issues of Existential Graphs. The tentative principle of selection of texts is ambitious: to be [End Page 114] “comprehensive”, that is, publishing the majority of the some 5000 ms. pages in which Peirce address EGs, including a vast amount of alternate text versions presented as footnotes and appendices to texts presented. A second principle is the overall chronological structure of the three volumes. A third is that texts already published (in the CP, in the NEM, or elsewhere) are left out. The two latter criteria, however, are rules of thumbs not rigorously followed.

This appears from the detailed 100-pages introduction to the present volume, which goes through each of the volume’s 28 selected texts and text collections from Peirce’s writings, spanning the period from 1895 to 1911. The selection is not strictly chronological, however, which is partially a result of the overall disposition of all of the three volumes. In a certain sense, the central volume of the whole project is that of volume two, still to appear, to cover Peirce’s intense 1903 developments and presentations of the EGs in the “Logical Tracts” and the “Lowell Lectures”, each of which are planned to fill one subvolume of Logic of the Future volume two. The third and final volume, “Pragmaticism and Correspondence” then, is planned to contain post-1903 EG writings related to Peirce’s Pragmaticism paper series in the Monist, in which Peirce puts the EGs to use in his mature arguments for pragmatism if not decidedly a proof of pragmatism—as well as Peirce’s presentation and discussion of the EGs in lengthy correspondence with colleagues.

These selection choices leave for the first volume primarily a batch of central texts documenting the early development of the EGs from 1896–98, forming the epicenter of the present volume. A bit surprisingly, this is flanked by two other batches of texts. First, texts 1–4, a small selection of philosophy-of-logic papers, most of them late, around 1910; Pietarinen’s argument is that these texts present Peirce’s most clarified general view of logic, as a preparation to the in medias res-texts of 1896. It appears as a further selection criterion in addition to the ones quoted, that of serving a novice reader with some easily accessible reading to begin with. They are mainly brief, late (1910...