Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 6. Charles S. Peirce

      Preface

      This is the sixth volume of the chronological edition of the writings of Charles S. Peirce, started in 1975 under the leadership of Max H. Fisch and Edward C. Moore and expected to run to thirty volumes. The edition is selective but comprehensive and includes all writings, on any subject, believed to shed significant light on the development of Peirce’s thought. The selections are edited according to the guidelines of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, and Volume 6 has been awarded the Committee’s seal as an approved edition.

      During the six years since Volume 5 appeared, the Peirce Edition Project has been reorganized and its production methods revamped to more fully integrate computing technology at all stages of operation and to put a system in place that can better support parallel volume editing. The integrity and continuity of the edition has remained a principal concern, but there have been a few changes in policy and practice that should be noted. These changes concern (1) the manuscript base that supports the edition, (2) the expected publication order of forthcoming volumes, and (3) the internal organization and style of the volumes.

      1. The Peirce Edition Project will no longer attempt to definitively reorganize all of Peirce’s manuscripts and to assign new chronologically-determined manuscript numbers. That effort, which involved only a virtual reorganization as the manuscript originals are not physically located in Indianapolis, was found to be unnecessarily time-consuming because it required the thorough study and reorganization of all Peirce’s manuscripts, including many that were not candidates for publication. For the purposes of the chronological edition, a less definitive rearrangement of manuscripts is satisfactory, one that integrates every manuscript within a unified chronology of all of Peirce’s writings, but which accepts in many cases the manuscript arrangements of the holding archives. The chronological catalogs beginning with this volume will number Peirce’s writings in their order of composition year by year, after the style of the Burks catalog in Volume 8 of the Collected Papers, and manuscripts will be identified by their Robin numbers (for Harvard’s Houghton Library collection) or by standard archive identifiers (for other collections). Future volumes will continue to be chronological, with their published texts generally identified by selection number and title rather than by a newly assigned manuscript number. (See the introduction to the Chronological Catalog, pp. 512–14, for further discussion.)

      2. Plans for forthcoming volumes are now being reconsidered and some revisions have already been made. For example, some advance work has been assigned on the manuscripts for Peirce’s 1901–02 “Minute Logic” and 1903 “Lowell Lectures” and it is possible that the volumes containing those writings will be published out of sequence. Other volumes that will contain single works or unified series of lectures are candidates for out-of-sequence publication, as are Peirce’s definitions for the Century Dictionary and Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. Although some of Peirce’s early work on definitions for the Century Dictionary was published in Volume 5, the editors have decided against further piecemeal publication of that work. Volume 7 will be devoted exclusively to a selection from Peirce’s thousands of contributions to the Century, and will include some of his contributions to the two-volume Century Supplement of 1909. Although this will require a slight departure from the strict chronological arrangement of texts that has characterized the Indiana edition, the editors believe it will prove to be the most useful and effective presentation of Peirce’s definitions. This special volume fits best into the general chronology following Volume 6 which runs to the middle of 1890, about half-way through the three-year period during which the Century first appeared in print and Peirce devoted more time to his dictionary work than to anything else. Volume 7 will appear out of sequence, the next volume scheduled for publication being Volume 8 which will include writings for the years 1890–92.

      3. A few changes to layout and format will be obvious on comparison of Volume 6 with earlier volumes. The selection headers have been redesigned and list the date of composition or publication and the location of copy-text manuscript or place of publication. Further information about text sources is recorded in the Textual Apparatus. The Chronology at the front of the volume has been slightly expanded for the period covered by Volume 6 (a practice that will be continued for future volumes). The Annotations have been slightly expanded from the corresponding Notes of earlier volumes, and include more quotations from unpublished manuscript material of the period. Some supplementary annotations will be published in the Electronic Companion for Volume 6 (www.iupui.edu/~peirce), which will be updated and expanded in the coming years. The Chronological Catalog (pp. 512–30), mentioned above, has been reconceived and includes more information about writings not selected for publication than was included in the Chronological Lists of earlier volumes. Discussions of editorial methods and practices, symbol use, and textual theory that were included in Prefaces to earlier volumes, have been moved to appropriate sections in the back matter, in particular to the Editorial Symbols section and the Essay on Editorial Theory and Method. In making these and other changes, the editors have been attentive to the need for continuity with the earlier volumes of the edition and hope that readers will find the transition to be smooth and the changes helpful.

      We wish to acknowledge our indebtedness to our host institution, Indiana University, for stewarding the Peirce Edition Project’s core staff resources through a time of fiscal austerity at both the university and the national level, and for providing increasing support through the late 1990s as the Project won new federal and private-sector grant commitments. We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding from pre-1993 grants that was used during the earliest stages of volume preparation, and for a renewed commitment beginning in 1997 that in part supported final volume preparation. Significant private-sector support came from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and from the Prince Charitable Trusts. We are most grateful to these organizations and to the late Helen Peirce Prince, Peirce’s grandniece, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the edition. We are grateful to the Charles S. Peirce Society and the Philosophy Documentation Center for financial support and for encouragement. We are especially grateful to the many individuals who have demonstrated their support by making private contributions.

      Acknowledgment is due as well to the Harvard University Department of Philosophy for permission to use the original manuscripts, and to the officers of the Houghton Library, especially Manuscripts Curator Leslie Morris, for their cooperation regarding the Charles

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