Peirce and Value Theory

Book excerpt: Most of the essays collected in this book were presented at the Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial Congress (Harvard University, September 1989). The volume is devoted to themes within Peirce's value theory and offers a comprehensive view of less known aspects of his influential philosophy, in particular Peirce's work on ethics and aesthetics.The book is divided in four sections. Section I discusses the status of ethics as a normative science and its relation with logic; some applications are presented, e.g. in the field of bioethics. Section II investigates the specific position of Peircean aesthetics with regard to classical American philosophy, especially Buchler, to Husserlian phenomenology, and to European structuralism (Saussure, Jakobson). Section III contains papers on internal aspects of Peirce's aesthetics and its place in his thought. The final section presents applications of Peirce's aesthetic theory: analyses of visual art (mainly paintings), of literary texts and of musical meaning.