- Peirce’s 1868 argument resonates both with his semiotic chains and with the later
maneuvers of Idealists such as Royce. Peirce holds that Cartesian doubt is an
impossibility; whereas Royce concludes that a larger Self is behind the activity of
doubting, Peirce specifies that the very thoughts in which the doubt is formulated
are composed of signs, whose meaning is in the system of signs and in the social
community which uses them. - Peirce’s life is often depicted as a melodrama illustrating the moralistic prejudices
of his day and the failure of America to honor genius. Alternatively, Brent (1993)
gives a reductionist explanation for Peirce’s career difficulties as the result of
chronic neuralgia, which drove him to drugs, and in turn to episodes of financial
and professional irresponsibility, outbursts of anger, and violence against his wives
and servants. Yet it appears that Peirce’s episodic afflictions, like his propensity for
personal conflicts, coincided with times of uncertainty and strain in his intellectual
career; he himself finally recognized that his sicknesses were set off emotionally by
adversity (Brent, 1993: 294). A more sociological interpretation is that Peirce’s
network position gave him high ambitions and resources, but placed insuperable
obstacles in the way of creating a clear-cut intellectual position. - Peirce was another of Dewey’s teachers, whose energy must have given some
indication of what could be done at the interface of Idealism and science; but
Peirce’s formal semiotic did not favorably impress the unmathematical Dewey
at all. - Experimental psychology in its academic origins stressed the overlap of physiology
and philosophy because the discipline was created by the migration of medical
physiologists into philosophy chairs—James in the United States, Wundt in Ger-
many—motivated by the shortage of positions in science faculties and the surplus
of positions in philosophy (Ben-David and Collins, 1966). Most American psy-
chologists of this generation had been sojourning pupils of Wundt. - Ruckmick (1912). The first independent psychology department in the world was
founded by G. Stanley Hall, Dewey’s old mentor, at Clark University in 1889. In
Germany experimental psychologists, ensconced in philosophy departments in a
university system which was no longer differentiating new chairs, never developed
behaviorism, but continued the philosophical focus on consciousness with in-
trospectionist psychology (1870s–1910) and then Gestalt psychology (1910s). I
examine the origins of experimental psychology within the German university
system in Chapter 13.
13. The Post-revolutionary Condition
- Kline (1972: 623). The point was repeated as late as 1810 by Delambre, secretary
of the mathematics and physics section of the Institut de France. - Abel had five papers in the first issue of Crelle’s journal (including his resolution
of the long-standing puzzle of the general solution of quintic equations), and
Galois’s general theory of the solvability of algebraic equations by means of the
theory of groups appeared in Liouville’s journal in 1846. - Practicing mathematicians, such as Euler, Lagrange, and Gauss, did occasionally
1012 •^ Notes to Pages 679–699