The Charles S. Peirce Society


2008 Charles S. Peirce Society
Essay Contest

Topic: Any topic on or related to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce.

Awards: $500 cash prize; presentation at the Society's annual meeting (held in conjunction with the Eastern APA); possible publication in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.

Submission Deadline: 30 September 2008

Length: Because the winning essay may be published in the Transactions, the length of contest submissions should be about the length of an average journal article. The maximum acceptable length is 10,000 words, including notes. The presentation of the winning submission at the annual meeting cannot exceed 30 minutes reading time.

Open to: Graduate students and persons who have held a Ph.D. or its equivalent for no more than seven years. Entries from students who have not yet begun their graduate training will not be considered. Past winners of the contest are ineligible. Joint submissions are allowed provided that all authors satisfy the eligibility requirements.

Advice to Essay Contest Entrants:

The winning entry will make a genuine contribution to the literature on Peirce. Therefore, entrants should become familiar with the major currents of work on Peirce to date and take care to locate their views in relation to published material that bears directly on their topic.

Entrants should note that scholarly work on Peirce frequently benefits from the explicit consideration of the historical development of his views. Even a submission that focuses on a single stage in that development can benefit from noting the stage on which it focuses in reference to other phases of Peirce's treatment of the topic under consideration. (This advice is not intended to reflect a bias toward chronological studies, but merely to express a strong preference for a chronologically informed understanding of Peirce's philosophy.)

Entrants are encouraged to relate, even if only briefly, Peirce's treatment of a topic with current discussions in philosophy and other disciplines.

We do not require but strongly encourage, where appropriate, citation of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Ideally, citation of texts found in both the Collected Papers and the Writings should be to both CP and W.

Submissions should be prepared for blind evaluation.

Electronic submissions are preferred. Submissions should be sent as email attachments (Microsoft Word documents, RTF files, or PDF files only) to Robert Lane, secretary-treasurer of the Society: rlane@westga.edu .

Submissions by traditional mail are also acceptable. Please mail submissions to:

Robert Lane
Philosophy Program
University of West Georgia
Carrollton, GA 30118
Attn: Peirce Essay Contest



Recent Winners of the Peirce Society Essay Contest

2007: Daniel McKaughan (USA), "From Ugly Duckling to Swan: C. S. Peirce, Abduction, and the Pursuit of Scientific Theories"

2006: Jérôme Havenel (France), "Peirce’s Clarifications on Continuity" (Transactions 44 (1), Winter 2008, pp.86-133)

2005: Shannon Dea (Canada), "'Merely a Veil Over the Living Thought': Math and Logic in Peirce's Forgotten Spinoza Review" (Transactions 42 (4), Fall 2006, pp.501-517)

2004: John Jacob Kaag (England), "Continuity and Inheritance: Kant's Critique of Judgement and the Work of C.S. Peirce" (Transactions 41 (3), Summer 2005, pp.515-540)

2003: Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen (Finland), "Peirce’s Magic Lantern: Moving Pictures of Thought"

2002: Mathias Girel (France), "The Metaphysics and Logic of Psychology: Peirce's Reading of James's Principles" (Transactions 39 (2), Spring 2003, pp.163-203)

2001: Jesse Norman (England), "Provability in Peirce's Alpha Graphs" (Transactions 39 (1), Winter 2003, pp.23-41)

2000: Menno Hulswit (the Netherlands), "Semeiotic and the Cement of the Universe: A Peircean Process Approach to Causation" (Transactions 37 (3), Summer 2001, pp.339-363)

1999: Mats Bergman (Finland), "Reflections on the Role of the Communicative Sign in Semeiotic" (Transactions 36 (2), Spring 2000, pp.225-254)

1998: Jeffrey Kasser (USA), "Peirce's Supposed Psychologism" (Transactions 35 (3), Summer 1999, pp.501-526)

1997: Sami Pihlstrom (Finland), "Peircean Scholastic Realism and Transcendental Arguments" (Transactions 34 (2), Spring 1998, pp.382-413)

1996: (tie) Timothy Herron (USA), "C. S. Peirce's Theory of Infinitesimals" (Transactions 33 (3), Summer 1997, pp.590-645) and Robert Lane (USA), " Peirce's 'Entanglement' with the Principles of Excluded Middle and Contradiction" (Transactions 33 (3), Summer 1997, pp.680-703)

1995: Andrew Reynolds (Canada), "Peirce's Cosmology and the Case of Thermodynamics" (Transactions 32 (3), Summer 1996, pp.403-423)

1994: Kelly J. Wells, "An Evaluation of Hartshorne's Critique of Peirce's Synechism" (Transactions 32 (2), Spring 1996, pp.216-246)



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