PEIRCE ON THE USES OF HISTORY BY TULLIO VIOLA

Abstract

Reviewed by: Peirce on the Uses of History by Tullio Viola Giovanni Maddalena Tullio Viola Peirce on the Uses of History Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2020. 261 pp. (incl. name and subject index) It is difficult to devise a new approach to any topic in Peirce scholarship, and it is also difficult to convincingly bring one to life. Tullio Viola's book, Peirce on the Uses of History, elegantly accomplishes this second trick, making it well worth reading. Viola is one of the many representatives of a new generation of Italian Peirce scholars (wherever based) who are connecting a solid philological and historical work about Peirce's writings with a vivid theoretical depth. Similar works by Chiara Ambrosio, Francesco Bellucci, Maria Regina Brioschi, Claudia Cristalli, Gabriele Gava, Maria Luisi, and Marco Stango on various aspects of Peirce's thought testify to the vitality of studies inspired by this profound connection. Peirce on the Uses of History deepens the various paths that relate the American philosopher's ideas to history, paths that discuss (a) Peirce's own studies of history, (b) his philosophical conception of history, and (c) his methodology for treating history. One of the few problems of the book is that Viola does not discuss each of these themes separately in its three parts, but rather, these topics are inextricably bound together due to the characteristic entanglement of Peirce's writings. However, Viola's reasoning and writing are absolutely clear, making it easy to follow these themes in the course of reading the seven chapters of the book. As for the first theme, Peirce's studies of history (a), the book's discussion in the two first chapters is splendid and worth reading for any Peirce scholar. Viola underlines the debt of Peirce to Whewell's metaphysical and logical views, which considered any observation as necessarily entailing conceptual elements, making history more the unfolding of vague, initial and real ideas than a sum of particular [End Page 288] accidents. As is well known, this approach would lead Peirce to a devotion to Duns Scotus's realism and then, at the beginning of the 1880s, in the Baltimore period, to research in a number of different fields of the history of science: the work on the Epistula de Magnete by Petrus Peregrinus, the biographies of great men, and the lexicography created in the long collaboration with the Century Dictionary. This growing interest would eventually lead to his two attempts to sketch a complete history of science in the Lowell Lectures of 1892—93 (that will be published in volume 9 of the Writings, cited by Viola) and the so-called "Putnam History" (never published) of the years 1896—98, in which Peirce's interests as a historian became intertwined with, and sometimes came into conflict with, Peirce's inquiry in both the philosophy and logic of history. The gist of this first part of Viola's book (chapter 1 and part of chapter 2), that has a short follow up in chapter 6, involves his description of the chronology of Peirce's studies of history and his argument that portions of these studies that have traditionally been seen as disjointed actually fit together seamlessly if one understands Peirce's attitude towards history. The reader will understand better the connections between Peirce's studies of Egyptian pyramids, the pronunciation of Shakespeare, and Mach's mechanics. If there is any quibble with this section of the book, it is that it does not satisfy the reader wanting to know more about some of the topics discussed, including the results of some of Peirce's research that apparently fell short of a proper conclusion and the historical studies that Peirce carried out in the later part of his life, after 1908. Viola treats the second theme, Peirce's philosophy of history (b), at the end of chapter 2, focusing on his classification of sciences. Here, Viola engages in his most effective philology, both in his comparison of the different versions of the classification and by putting to work the crucial notion of teleology and final causation that informs the process by which Peirce generated his classification. This notion is also at...