According to the standard interpretation, Italian pragmatism is split into two groups. On the one hand is the mathematician Giovanni Vailati, Peano’s former collaborator, and his disciple, the economist Mario Calderoni. On the other hand, there are the two “brats,” Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, naïve philosophers with eccentric ideas. While Vailati and Calderoni followed Peirce’s mathematical and logical pragmatism, the other two articulated a “magical” pragmatism, a kind of relativist, post-modern version of the original American movement. The (...) paper shows that this narrative is incomplete. During the years 1905-6, while Vailati was living in Florence, Italian pragmatists listed three kinds of pragmatism among themselves. Relying on the third stripe, attributed to Vailati, they found a more Unitarian, theoretical project that united the will to belief and the precision of reasoning. The unity did not last very long because Vailati moved from Florence in 1906. However, the common project from 1905-6 remains the highest peak of their awareness of pragmatism and, possibly, an original way to interpret it. (shrink)

In everyday reasoning - just as in science and art - knowledge is acquired more by "doing" than with long analyses. What do we "do" when we discover something new? How can we define and explore the pattern of this reasoning, traditionally called "synthetic"? Following in the steps of classic pragmatists, especially C.S. Pierce, Giovanni Maddalena's Philosophy of Gesture revolutionizes the pattern of synthesis through the ideas of change and continuity and proposes "gesture" as a new tool for (...) synthesis. Defining gesture as an action with a beginning and an end that carries on a meaning, Maddalena explains that it is a dense blending of all kinds of phenomena - feelings and vague ideas, actual actions, habits of actions - and of signs - icons, indexes, and symbols. When the blending of phenomena and signs is densest, the gesture is "complete," and its power of introducing something new in knowledge is at its highest level. Examples of complete gestures are religious liturgies, public and private rites, public and private actions that establish an identity, artistic performances, and hypothesizing experiments. A departure from a traditional Kantian framework for understanding the nature and function of reason, The Philosophy of Gesture proposes an approach that is more attuned with our ordinary way of reasoning and of apprehending new knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to read and understand gestures as logical tools within a synthetic paradigm of knowledge. This interpretation of gesture is drawn from a new pragmatist reading of reasoning in general, and synthetic reasoning in particular. Complete gestures are actions with a beginning and an end that bear a meaning. It is our regular way to embody vague ideas into singular actions with general meaning. The tool is forged by a dense blending of icons, indices, and symbols (...) and by a complexity of phenomenological characteristics as feelings, actual actions, general concepts and habits. The paper illustrates this new way to look at gestures and different kinds of complete and incomplete gestures. (shrink)

We study a contemporary need to complement analytic philosophy with pendular, synthetic approaches. We provide new definitions of the dyad analytics/synthetics and complete it with a natural third, horotics. Some historical trends to support a synthetic/horotic paradigm are studied: (i) Peirce’s ideas around his logic of continuity – non Cantorian continuum and existential graphs – emphasizing the importance of mathematical gestures, (ii) Gödel’s understanding of intuitionism as a synthetic counterpart of classical logic, along with a new horotic approach to his (...) work, (iii) Contemporary mathematical achievements (1950-2000), difficult to understand from analytical philosophy perspectives. Finally, we indicate some main features that a systematical synthetic/horotic reasoning should enforce, in order to fulfill its historic sequence. (shrink)

As correctly noticed by Vincent Colapietro, one of the few authors who have approached the topic, pragmatism and psychoanalysis followed parallel paths. The most obvious comparison between James and Freud did not seem to cast new light neither on the understanding of psyche nor on the two movements of thought. However, a different and less obvious comparison between Peirce and Jung might be more fruitful, notwithstanding the progressive antipsychologism of Peirce’s approach to logic. As we are going to see, this (...) unusual comparison is due to the strong epistemic and philosophical import of Jung’s mature theories as well as to Peirce’s tendency to provide a general theory of the mind, both conscious and unconscious. Therefore, this paper will try to understand the attitude that Peirce had towards psychology (I), to recall the part of Jung’s theory that has to do with Peirce’s pragmatism (II), to assess the relationship between the two authors and the reciprocal advantage in mutually integrating their theories (III). (shrink)

The idea of ‘gesture’ is present in the philosophical world in various forms. All of them might find an important theoretical grounding in pragmatist philosophy, if we combine pragmatism with some French philosophies of mathematics and read it as a way out of the Kantian philosophy of representation. The paper uses the insights of Jean Cavaillès to set out the problem of the weakness of the epistemic Kantian defense of mathematical and logical thought. Cavaillès rejected the possible amendments to Kant’s (...) explanation provided by both Husserl and Bolzano and their heirs. He used the word ‘gesture’ in order to explain the activity of mathematicians who have to act synthetically, following rules, with some physical representation, and being aware of the possibility of failure. Cavaillès conceived the use of gesture as an alternative to the Heidegerian idea of event defended by Albert Lautman. The paper then follows the idea of gesture in the French philosophy of mathematics of Gilles Châtelet and Giuseppe Longo. Finally, the paper illustrates how Peirce’s study of Existential Graphs and the main insights of pragmatism complete Cavaillès’s idea by giving to gestures a phenomenological and semiotic structure. The pragmatist philosophy of gesture is thus a new way of overthrowing Kant’s philosophy of representation without surrendering to irrationalism. (shrink)

Italy was one of the first places outside the US to manifest an interest in pragmatism. However, the reception of Peirce has been discontinuous and asymptotic at the same time. It grew over the time getting closer and closer to a complete acknowledgement of what Peirce had really written, but there were many periods in which studies on Peirce seemed quite stuck or absent. For clarity sake I will divide this reception in three big generational waves. 1. The First Wave: (...) Leonardo The first one i... (shrink)

This paper explores the intertwinement of ontology and history that happened after the idealist turn of Kantian transcendentalism, particularly in classic German idealism and later in American pragmatism. The paper focuses on the less remarked-upon consequence of this intertwinement, namely the possibility of a new reading of history based on changes in concepts and habitual mentality. The paper proposes a new take on historiography that vindicates Hegel’s insight but changes his approach to a pragmatist one, more apt to face historical (...) changes in a technical way and less easily twistable into ideological frameworks. The paper argues that the notion of habit, as phenomenologically and semiotically described by Peirce, is the fundamental cellule of the pragmatist take on the entanglement of history and ontology. The paper elaborates on the notion of habit, singling out a special form of it called “gesture” that can be a useful tool for reading the history of the human spirit without incorporating Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute. The paper compares the notion of gesture as it originated in the pragmatist tradition with the parallel use of the term in the early studies of Michel Foucault and argues that the notion of gesture is better equipped to tackle a theoretical reading of history. (shrink)

Roberto Frega & Giovanni Maddelena – Can you recollect what the situation was concerning the study of pragmatism when you were in college? Richard J. Bernstein – I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1951. At the time the “Hutchins College” was an unusual institution. The entire curriculum was fixed and it was organized around reading many of the great books of the Western tradition. From the time I arrived, I was reading Plato, Aristotle, (...) Galileo, Darwin, Herodotus... (shrink)

Comentario en contexto de Vincent M. Colapietro, Acción, sociabilidad y drama. Un retrato pragmatista del animal humano, La Plata, Edulp, 2020 reseña por Giovanni Maddalena. Traducción: Cristina Di Gregori, Livio Mattarollo y Giovanni Maddalena.

The problematic issues connected to post-truth communication emerged in all their social relevance after the victory of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. Fake news, echo chambers, filter bubbles, and a crisis of experts are some of the phenomena of this epoch of digital revolution that everyone is forced to deal with on daily basis. Public media echoed the plea for a return to a connection between reality, truth, and communication that has been advocated for by philosophy and communication studies (...) since the beginning of the century. However, the strategy for effecting this return is not clear. The paper presents two of the most common strategies employed by practitioners of communication in the newsrooms: reliance on a new form of positivism and the necessity of inculcating critical media literacy into the general population. Concluding that both proposals are inadequate, the paper proposes a rich, relational realism stemming from Peirce’s semiotic and metaphysical studies. (shrink)

Michelle Bella & Giovanni Maddalena – Many Peirce scholars wonder about what is going on with the publication of the Writings? André De Tienne – The answer is at once, almost nothing, but a lot! We are in a state of quasi-limbo, and so people do notice that we have not been publishing any volume for the last 10 years and the universal question is, what is happening to the Peirce Edition Project? It is a question that I (...) keep asking myself! But I am glad to share this more publicly, so that peo... (shrink)

Peirce did not achieve a final systematization of his work. Beyond the difficulties in explaining so many philosophical tools that he introduced—suffice it to mention semiotic, abductive logic, a heuristic based on continuity, scholastic realism—, there is a theoretical reason for this incompletion. All those new philosophical tools indicated a conception of synthesis very different from the one he received from Kant. Peirce did not realize the profound direction of his enquiry so that he did not directly question neither Kant’s (...) legacy on this issue nor the idea of necessity that presides over it. Starting from Peirce’s conception of continuity and change, this paper will give a new definition of synthetic and analytic judgments and reasoning, completing the picture with a third “vague” judgment and reasoning. In this new definition a synthetic judgment is a judgment that recognizes identity through changes. An analytical judgment is a judgment that loses identity through changes. A vague judgment is a judgment that it is blind to identity through changes. How do we perform synthetic reasoning? Following Peirce’s semiotic study of elements of Gamma Graphs as the sheet of assertion and the line of identity, the paper will first individuate the semiotic characteristics necessary for the recognition of identity. These characteristics lead us to discover “complete gesture” as the tool that we use in our every-day reasoning in order to acquire new knowledge synthetically. “Complete gestures” are actions through which we carry and recognize significant meanings. This new paradigm should provide an improved account of common-sense knowledge as well as of particular creative and hypothetic stages of conception in both scientific and humanistic thought. (shrink)

Although questionable for its style and method, irritating in its conclusions and judgments, and political in the broad sense of the word, Carlin Romano’s book is a courageous work that fully belongs to the pragmatist tradition. It recalls the style and the tone of some Italian pragmatists like Papini and Prezzolini, whose books lacked perhaps some deep technical tools but were apt to shake the intellectual world and substantially to the point in many critiques. As the Italian pragmatists for...

“Comprendre est en attraper le geste, et pouvoir continuer”(J. Cavaillès) “The general theory of signs fails essentiallyif it does not encompass a philosophical account of gesture” (Colapietro 2016: 170) Let me first thank Rosa M. Calcaterra and Roberto Frega, co-directors of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, who were so kind to organize this symposium. I also thank all contributors and Matteo Santarelli who edited the whole work. It is a great honor to me that such...

Perhaps due to the period of international crisis, appeals to creativity multiplied in any field. Sure enough, when the status quo cannot grant welfare conditions anymore, something new is needed. And the problem of novelty intertwines that kind of thought that goes by the name of creativity. Philosophically speaking, this request means to question what creativity really is, which are its cognitive processes, whether it is teachable, and where it comes from. A first methodological question is...

Nynfa Bosco (1929-2013) was an interesting, important and eccentric character in Italian post-World War II philosophy studies. She was one of the first women to successfully pursue a university career, capable of mastering several languages when few in Italy could decently speak one, and gifted with an agile and compelling writing style. Nynfa Bosco published in 1959 the first Italian monograph on Peirce and in 1977 a translation of some important articles of the founder of pragmatism. Despite the technical approximation, (...) mainly determined by the texts available at that time, Bosco understood the original ethical and metaphysical dimension of Peirce's logical writings, anticipating some readings that would emerge only many years later. (shrink)

Gava's book is worth reading. It is one of the best accounts of the attempt to read Peirce within a transcendental model of philosophy. This position is now one of the most powerful in Peirce's scholarship, even though it is highly problematic from both an exegetical and a theoretical standpoint. I will try to explain these problems at the end of this review, but first I will sketch Gava's detour and some positive advancements in Peirce's scholarship that he accomplishes.Gava's way (...) to link Peirce to transcendental philosophy is based on a general reading of the development of Peirce's thought. In this reading, Peirce would have been very Hegelian in his early writings where he strongly linked "being"... (shrink)

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 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... (shrink)

The paper will focus on Rorty’s project as it emerges in the compelling introductions to his books from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onwards. Even disagreeing with his conclusions, some interesting items suggest that Rorty was a legitimate member of the pragmatist family and that he shared with classic pragmatists much more than a reader can see at first glance. First, Rorty understood better than anyone else that the fight against Kant’s rationalism is crucial to pragmatism considered as a (...) whole. He paralleled Kantism with the history of explaining knowledge as a mirroring representation and he wanted to get rid of it. Second, Rorty shared with classic pragmatists what I call the “synthetic drive” of philosophy, namely, the view of philosophy as the habit of action of looking at anything in a way that makes it “hang together with everything else.” Third, the outcome of the synthetic drive is conceiving philosophy as a transformative activity. In all these cases, Rorty took roads at odds with classic pragmatism but he did not betray the general aim and spirit of the American movement of thought. (shrink)

The Italian Pragmatists were a group of philosophers in the early 20th century. They gathered around the journal _Leonardo_, which was published in Florence. This volume emphasizes what they all shared, as well as their value for philosophy and culture.

This paper is a contribution to the study of the four classical Italian pragmatists: Papini, Prezzolini, Vailati and Calderoni. They are seen more as representatives of a pragmatist movement than as singular systematic thinkers. The center of Italian pragmatism was the periodical, Leonardo, where these authors discussed and presented an original and provocative understanding of pragmatist philosophy. Thier understanding of pragmatist philosophy has often been underestimated by the subsequent literature. They showed a good comprehension of the novelty brought by American (...) pragmatism but, ignoring some of the most important epistemic aspects of Peirce’s and James’s theories, their philosophical proposals often missed consistency. However, even in their misunderstandings, they signaled a need and possibly a weakness of the whole pragmatist movement. Italian pragmatists underlined the importance of the concreteness of individuals in the realization of universal laws of mathematics and logic, physics and psychology. But, this attitude suffered from some serious tensions between metaphysical assumptions and methodological claims. (shrink)

I. Introduction Can phenomenology and pragmatism, two early twentieth century theories, be alive today and furnish a valid possibility in our philosophical landscape? Moreover, can they work together? The operation does not seem impossible since Peirce himself held a phenomenology, which is an indispensable part of his never-finished system; James’s psychology is often a phenomenology, and Husserl recognized James as an interesting author because of his phenomenological insights. However, the...

This study sought to determine if hues overlayed on a video recording of a piano performance would systematically influence perception of its emotional arousal level. The hues were artificially added to a series of four short video excerpts of different performances using video editing software. Over two experiments 106 participants were sorted into 4 conditions, with each viewing different combinations of musical excerpts and hue combinations. Participants rated the emotional arousal depicted by each excerpt. Results indicated that the overall arousal (...) ratings were consistent with the nominal arousal of the selected excerpts. However, hues added to video produced no significant effect on arousal ratings, contrary to predictions. This could be due to the domination of the combined effects of other channels of information over the emotional effects of the hypothesized influence of hue on perceived performance. To our knowledge this is the first study to investigate the impact of these hues upon perceived arousal of music performance, and has implications for musical performers and stage lighting. Further research that investigates reactions during live performance and manipulation of a wider range of lighting hues, saturation and brightness levels, and editing techniques, is recommended to further scrutinize the veracity of the findings. (shrink)

Objective: To assess the psychological distress of healthcare providers working in the field of obstetrics during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and to identify factors associated with psychological distress at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational level.Design: Cross-sectional survey study.Setting: Four University hospitals in Italy.Participants: HCPs working in obstetrics, including gynecologists, residents in gynecology and obstetrics, and midwives.Methods: The 104-item survey Impatto PSIcologico COVID-19 in Ostetricia was created by a multidisciplinary expert panel and administered to HCPs in obstetrics in May 2020 (...) via a web-based platform.Main Outcome Measures: Psychological distress assessed by the General Health Questionnaire-12 included in the IPSICO survey.Results: The response rate to the IPSICO survey was 88.2%, and that for GHQ-12 was 84.4%. Just over half of the GHQ-12 respondents reported a clinically significant level of psychological distress. Psychological distress was associated with either individual, interpersonal, and organizational factors in dealing with the pandemic.Conclusions: Results confirm the need for monitoring and assessing the psychological distress for HCPs in obstetrics. Interventions at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational level may relieve the psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and foster resilience skills in facing emotional distress. (shrink)

Together with the members and promoters of the Associazione Culturale Pragma, we very pleased to celebrate the third anniversary of its foundation with the launching of a new journal devoted to the study of American philosophy, the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. It is, in fact, a particularly important achievement which comes to strengthen our confidence in the positive relationships among a wide international group of academics and scholars that already produced a nu...

The symposium “Peirce in the World” is a homage that EJPAP wants to pay to the Centenary of the death of the great American thinker Charles S. Peirce, one of the founding fathers of pragmatism. The idea of the symposium stems from observing that Peirce studies are nowadays spread out all over the world, and the scholarship that comes from outside the US is becoming more and more important in breadth and depth. This phenomenon is possibly the greatest change that (...) happened to Peirce scholarship... (shrink)

Western Philosophy’s modern period has been very much shaped by a representationalism according to which “concepts” (earlier: “ideas”) assembled into “propositions” constitute the fundamental unit of meaning, thought, belief— and even, in the hands of 20th century philosophers such as G.E.M. Anscombe and Jaegwon Kim— action, conceived as performed under a description. What exactly a proposition consists in ontologically is not easy to explain in a manner consonant with prevailing scientific naturalism. But it is clearly a disembodied entity, some kind (...) of abstract object. But in human behaviour, much depends on not just what is done but how it is done (and this ‘how’ will possess a beginning, middle, and end denied to abstract objects). The ‘how’ may be understood as gesture, and Maddalena’s book takes a first pass across how a philosophy that takes this, rather than disembodied meanings, as its foundation might organise itself. The result is a fascinating wealth of germinal ideas, not all of which I have space to discuss here. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Gesture by Giovanni Maddalena is a multilayered volume: It is a "history of philosophy" book, endorsing a challenging anti-Kantian interpretation of Peirce and pragmatism. It is a "theoretical philosophy" book, dealing with classic issues—for example, the difference between synthetic and analytic, the definition of identity—and introducing a new concept, that of complete gesture. Finally, it is a book of "applied philosophy," pointing to a further application of the new concept of complete gesture to the fields (...) of pedagogy, morality, psychology, and literature.Dealing with all these three aspects in a single review would be impossible, maybe even unfair. Therefore, I will focus here mainly on the... (shrink)

Rarely these days are philosophy books both bold and sweeping, but Maddalena’s The Philosophy of Gesture is both. Whether you think that is good will surely depend on your philosophical temperament. Personally, I consider it bad taste to criticize a philosopher for striking out on a new path. Philosophy, as any student of Peirce’s works will affirm, is an experimental science. Some of those experiments might well lead you to the hinterlands, but at least you will have a more (...) detailed map. As with reading any book, the question to ask is not: What is wrong with it? But: What can I learn from it? Reading Maddalena’s book, I had the distinct sense of reading something like James’s Pragmatism. Much is... (shrink)

In February 1907 Giovanni Papini wrote on Leonardo that “Pragmatism” did not exist; there were “only pragmatist theories and more or less pragmatist thinkers.” Rather than “a nice system born out of the brain of a single philosopher” or of “an homogeneous school,” pragmatism was “a coalition of theories of various origins and nature.” The rich pragmatist genealogy offered by Il pragmatismo. Dalle origini agli sviluppi contemporanei, edited by Rosa M. Calcaterra, Giovanni Maddalena and Giancar...

Comments on G. Maddalena and G. Tuzet, editors, I Pragmatisti Italiani. Tra Alleati e Nemeci (Italian Pragmatists. Between Enemies and Allies). Milano: Albo Versorio, 2007.

The physical, psychological, and spiritual violence against fat bodies in the US, committed in service of a racist, sexist, classist, and ableist vision of an idealized body size, is death-dealing. This essay develops a theo-ethical vision of fat liberation that rejects the trappings of the “religion of thinness” and celebrates the inherent worth of fat bodies through an incarnational theology that recognizes the image of God in every body size, the presence of body size diversity in creation, and the full (...) inclusion of all body sizes at the eucharistic table. (shrink)

Proprioception is a crucial sensory modality involved in the control and regulation of coordinated movements and in motor learning. However, the extent to which proprioceptive acuity is influenced by local muscle fatigue is obscured by methodological differences in proprioceptive and fatiguing protocols. In this study, we used high resolution kinematic measurements provided by a robotic device, as well as both frequency and time domain analysis of signals captured via surface electromyography (sEMG) to examine the effects of local muscle fatigue on (...) wrist proprioceptive acuity in 16 physically and neurologically healthy young adults. To this end, participants performed a flexion/extension ipsilateral joint position matching test (JPM), after which a high-resistive robotic task was used to induce muscle fatigue of the flexor carpi radialis (FCR) muscle. The JPM test was then repeated in order to analyze potential changes in proprioceptive acuity. Results indicated that the fatigue protocol had a significant effect on movements performed in flexion direction, with participants exhibiting a tendency to undershoot the target before the fatigue protocol (-1.218°), but overshooting after the fatigue protocol (0.587°). In contrast, in the extension direction error bias values were similar before and after the fatigue protocol as expected (pre = -1.852°, post = -1.237°) and reflected a tendency to undershoot the target. Moreover, statistical analysis indicated that movement variability was not influenced by the fatigue protocol or movement direction. In sum, results of the present study demonstrate that an individual’s estimation of wrist joint displacement (i.e., error bias), but not precision (i.e., variability), is affected by muscular fatigue in a sample of neurologically and physically healthy adults. (shrink)

Medical imaging is predominantly a visual field. In this context, prenatal ultrasound images assume intense social, ethical, and psychological significance by virtue of the subject they represent: the fetus. This feature, along with the sophistication introduced by three-dimensional ultrasound imaging that allows improved visualization of the fetus, has contributed to the common impression that prenatal ultrasound scans are like photographs of the fetus. In this article we discuss the consistency of such a comparison. First, we investigate the epistemic role of (...) both analogic and digital photographic images as visual information-providing representations holding a high degree of objectivity. Second, we examine the structure and process of production of ultrasound scans and argue that a comparison between two-dimensional ultrasound and photography is justified. This is in contrast to 3D ultrasound images that, due to the intensive mathematical processing involved in their production, present some structural issues that obfuscate their ontological and epistemic status. (shrink)