Abstract

Charles S. Peirce Society 2016 Presidential Address Peirce never could finalize a book or publish it and especially no book on the aesthetic basis of pragmaticism. This is not only a historical note, but has a deeper meaning. It arouses in the attentive reader a strong desire to do what Peirce himself did not have the chance to do: to find a way of linking together his hints and clues in such a way that respects the spirit of his work and not just its letter. This practice of apprehending the spirit is successful, I believe, when, on the one hand, we familiarize ourselves with the author’s text and, on the other, perhaps more importantly, when we initiate this apprehension because the text arouses a feeling of...