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

Many natural connections between Peirce and Whitehead have been appearing since Peirce’s manuscripts (around 100,000 pages) began to be published in Harvard’s Collected Papers edition (1931–1935–1958). The resemblances are profound, based on speculative philosophies founded on interactions between science and philosophy, in turn erected over a wide understanding of mathematical thought. Some doctoral dissertations (Murphy 1940, Green 1968, Limper 1975, Sinclair 2007) have explored the field, but a full monograph was still needed in order to clarify the panorama. Maria Regina Brioschi’s Creativity Between Experience and Cosmos. C.S. Peirce and [End Page 631] A.N. Whitehead on Novelty provides the sound, exact, and extremely precise work that was required, and constitutes the first published book-length investigation of the interactions between Peirce and Whitehead. Reason, relation, and realism connect their systems, addressed to a broad understanding of knowledge, as in the citation from Whitehead that appears on the back cover of Brioschi’s book: “At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. The Universe is vast”. Vastness is directly related to the problem of novelty, which requires the imaginary multidimensionality of human thought, helping us to escape a detail-focused complacency (the closures of analytical philosophy), and yearn for new adventures (the openings of synthetic philosophy).

The architecture of Brioschi’s book is meticulous, well balanced and clear. Part I (“The Problem of Novelty Between Peirce and Whitehead”, pp. 19–76) studies the problem of novelty at large (Chapter 1), offers a view of the interactions between Peirce and Whitehead (Chapter 2), and provides a discussion of the state of the art and a map of the book (Chapter 3). Part II (“Peirce’s Account of Novelty”, pp. 77–172) investigates Peirce’s categories and the experience of novelty (Chapter 1), Peirce’s gnoseological account of novelty (Chapter 2), and Peirce’s cosmological account of novelty (Chapter 3). In a similar methodological vein, Part III (“Whitehead’s Account of Novelty”, pp. 173–273) studes Whitehead’s phenomenological account of novelty (Chapter 1), his gnoseological account of novelty (Chapter 2), and his cosmological account of novelty (Chapter 3). A Conclusion (pp. 274–288) sums up the main points of resemblance and divergence between Peirce and Whitehead, previously stated in Part I, Chapter 2. An up to date large Bibliography (pp. 289–311) includes primary and secondary literature on Peirce and on Whitehead, and a section on common secondary literature as well. An Index of Names (pp. 313–316) and an Index of Concepts (pp. 317–318) serve as useful guides for the reader.

One of the main points of the book is to offer a careful analysis of the complementary dimensions of knowledge captured by both Peirce and Whitehead: philosophies which address—in a unifying manner—the individual and the cosmos, human mind and nature, reason and imagination, concreteness and generalization, continuity and process. Maria Regina Brioschi has profited from her insertion in the careful Italian tradition on Peirce studies (led in part by Rossella Fabbrichesi in Milano, Brioschi’s teacher) and from her own attentive handling of Whitehead (translation and edition of Whitehead’s Process and Reality: A.N. Whitehead, Processo e realtà. Saggio di cosmologia, Firenze: Bompiani, 2019, 1366 pp.) Both expertises are well reflected in Brioschi’s Creativity Between Experience and Cosmos, where the young [End Page 632] Italian researcher is able to weave our infinitesimal place in nature with the infinite wanderings of the cosmos. The back-and-forth between the local (at experiential human scale) and the global (at universal cosmological scale) is in fact one of main forces of Peirce and Whitehead’s approaches to knowledge, and Brioschi surveys the many...