"Peirce was an intellectual Swiss Army knife. Mathematics, logic, philosophy, science, semiotics—whatever the discipline, he could slice through it with his nimble, creative mind."
— McCabe, Bret
Author
Work Title
Date
2012
Metaphor
"Peirce was an intellectual Swiss Army knife. Mathematics, logic, philosophy, science, semiotics—whatever the discipline, he could slice through it with his nimble, creative mind."
Metaphor in Context
Conversations with Macksey refreshingly wander as memories and ideas open narrative trapdoors, fitting for a man who chose Proust for his dissertation. These digressions can venture into intellectual life's lesser-known nooks, such as indelible eccentrics who were unable to fit into the academy's square pegs.
"We had Charles Sanders Peirce, who was the most brilliant of all eccentrics and one of the most difficult," Macksey says. Peirce was an intellectual Swiss Army knife. Mathematics, logic, philosophy, science, semiotics—whatever the discipline, he could slice through it with his nimble, creative mind. His Johns Hopkins career was far too brief, 1879 to 1884, but the shadow he cast was long enough for Macksey to invoke Peirce's chutzpah for "adapting the methods of one science to the investigation of another" during the opening remarks to The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man symposium held at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library from October 18 to 21, 1966. It assembled a cadre of French intellectuals whose multifaceted investigations of the social sciences had made structuralism, the very loose umbrella for a wide array of thought, existentialism's successor. By the end of the conference, though, a Peirce sentence from his 1891 Architecture of Theories provided a more fitting epitaph: "May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world."
"We had Charles Sanders Peirce, who was the most brilliant of all eccentrics and one of the most difficult," Macksey says. Peirce was an intellectual Swiss Army knife. Mathematics, logic, philosophy, science, semiotics—whatever the discipline, he could slice through it with his nimble, creative mind. His Johns Hopkins career was far too brief, 1879 to 1884, but the shadow he cast was long enough for Macksey to invoke Peirce's chutzpah for "adapting the methods of one science to the investigation of another" during the opening remarks to The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man symposium held at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library from October 18 to 21, 1966. It assembled a cadre of French intellectuals whose multifaceted investigations of the social sciences had made structuralism, the very loose umbrella for a wide array of thought, existentialism's successor. By the end of the conference, though, a Peirce sentence from his 1891 Architecture of Theories provided a more fitting epitaph: "May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure to give his results to the world."
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Bret McCabe, "Structuralism's Samson" Johns Hopkins Magazine (Fall 2012). <Link>
Date of Entry
09/24/2012
