Abstract

On Peirce’s terms, the history of philosophy is a vast field of mind, a complexifying network of general ideas that contribute to the formation and valorization of human civilization through the expressions of individual authors and schools in their culturally specific times. The accumulating legacy of philosophical wisdom underwrites these individual expressions. But while for short term good reasons contemporary scholarship trends towards the exegesis of individual authors and schools, the “professional” practice runs the danger of being narrow-gauge in scholarly focus. The excitement of Peirce, and for that matter any major author, consists in adjudicating his place in the “cosmical” or public space of..