Minutes of the Business Meeting
Charles Sanders Peirce Society
28 December 2009
Following the annual scholarly meeting, with papers by President Larry Laudan (“The Law: (Con)Fusing Epistemology and Political Morality?”) and Essay Contest winner Andrew F. Smith (“Truth, Negation, and the Limit of Inquiry: Revisiting the Problem of Buried Secrets”), President Laudan called the meeting to order at 6:50pm at the New York Marriott Marquis.
1. Larry Laudan asked for a moment of silence for John E. Smith, a past president of the Society who passed away in 2009.
2. Larry Laudan asked for approval of the minutes of the 2008 business meeting. The minutes were approved.
3. Larry Laudan delivered the following report from the President and the Executive Committee:
The committee met from 10:30am until about noon on the morning of Monday December 28. Those in attendance were: Larry Laudan, Robert Lane, Rosa Mayorga, Matthew Moore, Mats Bergmann, and Douglas Anderson. André De Tienne, Director and General Editor of the Peirce Edition Project, was an invited attendee. Chief among the issues discussed by the Executive Committee were the following.
Respectfully,
Larry Laudan
4. Douglas Anderson delivered the following report for the Transactions:
1. This year Scott Pratt joined the editing staff as Editor of non-Peirce submissions. Sami Pihlström joined as Review Editor.
2. As of mid-summer, Indiana University Press noted that our readership was steady—almost precisely the same as the previous year. There is still some concern that many subscriptions are electronic rather than print.
3. Our acceptance rate for the year was 14-16% depending on how one counts papers in symposia, etc. We have noted that an increased percentage of our submissions are coming from outside the U. S.—we take that to be a sign of health for Peirce studies and American philosophy generally.
4. We are presently one issue behind in our schedule. Our aim in 2010 is to get back on the normal schedule so that the spring issue arrives in the spring, etc. Our second task this coming year will be to revise the editorial board. The editors will work with the Society’s Board and with the newly established International Advisory Committee to accomplish this.
5. The first issue for 2010 will include a symposium on the work of Peter Hare.
Thank you,
Doug Anderson
5. Robert Lane delivered a preliminary version of the following financial report:
The Society’s income in 2009 was $5,358.26: $2,499.30 in membership dues; $2,822.10 in Transactions royalties; and $36.86 in interest. Our 2009 expenditures were $1,154.51: $500 for the 2009 essay contest prize; $75.11 for postage (payment to John Shook, for shipping Peter Hare’s files to André deTienne and to me); $221 for FISP (Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie) dues for 2009; $275 for IUHPS/DLMPS (International Union of History and Philosophy of Science / Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science) dues for 2008, 2009 and 2010; and $83.40 for web-site fees. As of December 31, 2009, the Society’s assets were $11,686.99, an increase of $4,203.75 from last year. The breakdown of the assets is: $3,628.42 in checking, $7,984.20 in a money-market account, $74.37 in savings.
6. André De Tienne delivered the following report on the Peirce Edition Project:
I am pleased to begin this annual report on an upbeat note: Volume 8 is published, it is out! At more than 820 pages, it is the largest volume in our series yet, covering the period from May 1890 to July 1892. We are elated that this volume has finally come out. I encourage interested readers to buy it directly from Indiana University Press rather than from online providers to help increase the benefit it provides both to the Press and the Project.
Finalizing that volume was my first priority when I succeeded Nathan Houser. Houser’s last momentous contribution to the Project was the writing of the introduction to volume 8. The text of it in W8 is his longest introduction ever (it ends on p. xcvii), but that version is only two-thirds of the original he submitted. The complete unabbreviated version can be downloaded from the Project’s website (and also from Joseph Ransdell’s Arisbe website).
Houser retired at the end of April 2009. He has now finished building himself a large study at home, and we wish him well as he now embarks in what we hope will be long productive years of studying and writing about the philosophical objects of his interest.
In other staff news, I am pleased to say that our two long-time transcribers, Joseph Kaposta and Diana Reynolds, have now been promoted to senior editorial associates in recognition of their loyal and steady work over many years. Assistant Textual Editor David Spiech ended his half-time with us in July 2009 and returned full-time to the Santayana Edition. My colleague Kees de Waal became Editor of the Transactions for Peirce submissions. And my promotion to professor of philosophy became effective last July.
In March 2009, Thomas L. Short stepped down from his position as chairman of the Advisory Board, after eight years of signal service, and was succeeded by Professor Vincent Colapietro. Professor Colapietro is at the moment busy overhauling the composition of the Board: new members are being invited to join it, some of the current members are being reappointed, and others are being thanked for their past services and let go.
The plan I negotiated in August 2008 with our school administration called for three new positions at the Peirce Project: an assistant research editor to do manuscript reconstruction work; an associate textual editor to critically edit the texts; and a technical editor to revamp our electronic production methodology. The current economic crisis hit the university pretty hard, and as a result Dean Blomquist was only able to grant us one such position, one I had been lobbying especially hard for: that of the technical editor. This has become an Institute-wide position—an important reason that made this permanent hire especially appealing to the Dean. It was the most urgent of the three positions, for the time has come for the Project, and for the other three scholarly editions in the Institute for American Thought, to rethink fundamentally our electronic infrastructure in order to move us all to a new level of productivity while helping us meet ever increasing demands for electronic access and interactivity from our diverse constituencies. I am pleased to announce that an IAT-wide search committee chaired by Director David Pfeifer recently concluded its work and found a very promising associate technical editor in the person of Ms. Ali Zimmerman, who is set to start in January 2010, and who at first will be working full-time for the Peirce Project only.
Having just mentioned his name, I should like to announce that Professor David Pfeifer succeeded interim Director Jonathan Eller (PEP’s textual editor) at the head of the Institute in July 2009. We are all very pleased with his appointment. Professor Pfeifer is a hardworking administrator with a great deal of experience, as a past president of Principia College in Elsah, IL, and an emeritus professor of philosophy who used to be a student of Max H. Fisch.
The second most crucial position the Project needs to hire is that of an associate textual editor, to reduce our textual-editing backlog. Our very own textual editor, Jon Eller, was made some years ago senior textual editor for all IAT editions, and as a result he has become too overextended to maintain the pace of work we need. Since the School lacks the funds for an additional textual editor, I have made its financing the center-piece of the budget I submitted in the Project’s latest application to the National Endowment for the Humanities. In October 2009 I sent indeed to NEH a three-year grant proposal. Its work plan was built on three premises: (1) that W8 would have been published by now, which it is; (2) that a technical editor would be hired in early 2010, which is the case; and (3) that W9 would be done before the start of a new grant in August 2010—this is the goal we are now working hard to achieve. The core of our plan for the three years of the grant is (1) to finish W11 within the first half of the grant period, while (2) our friends in Montreal, directed by Professor François Latraverse, finish work on W7, and (3) to produce W22.
Volume 22 is devoted to Peirce’s Lowell Lectures of 1903. Some years ago, Professor Helmut Pape (University of Bamberg, Germany) received a DFG grant to work on W22. He and his team were able to organize all the manuscripts associated with these lectures, to reconstruct their complex genealogy, and to propose a plan of publication. In order to prevent that very valuable work from losing any of its freshness, and also to curtail the possibility of the lectures being published by others ahead of a full-fledged critical edition, I have decided that the Project will finish the work begun by Helmut Pape as soon as W11 is done, and completion of W22 has thus become another major part of the NEH grant proposal.
Our associate technical editor’s primary mission will be to build a database/editing/layout platform inspired from the very impressive platform our Montreal colleagues have produced for the making of W7. My hope is that W22 will be the first volume produced through such a platform, which will be engineered so that much of the product of our work can also become accessible on-line.
Regarding the introductions to all these volumes now in the pipeline, that to W7 will be written by Professor François Latraverse (he has become the de facto expert of Peirce’s work on the Century Dictionary). I will write the introduction to W9. Professor Randy Dipert has agreed to write most of the introduction to W11 (PEP will supply some ingredients, principally biographical). And Professor Pape is firmly committed to write the introduction to W22.
As far as hiring an assistant research editor is concerned—our third most important hire, to be a young Ph.D. with a Peirce thesis—we will need to look for other sources of funding. There are not many obvious sources for this, not among the federal agencies and hardly among private foundations, as far as we can tell. Our main hope is through a steady stream of sizable annual donations. The Project has been blessed over many years by the number of gifts made by many to sustain its operations. A handful of donors have been especially great benefactors, with gifts frequently above $5,000 or even $10,000. We need to increase our outreach toward more of such persons of means who rightfully believe in the timeless importance of our mission, and plans are underway, with the help of the Institute, to promote the Project at first within the local Indianapolis community, and then beyond. It will take time for such efforts to come to fruition, especially in today’s hard times. And therefore the continuing staunch support of the entire Peirce constituency, national and international, remains essential. I would like to encourage everyone, especially those who have not enjoyed the opportunity to give yet, to make a tax-exempt donation to the Project. Every dollar helps, though not as much as every hundred or thousand dollars do.
On a final positive note, one of the great joys of working at the Peirce Project has always been the visiting researchers who stay with us for days, weeks, months, or even years. In 2009 we had the pleasure to host visitors from Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Spain, and several US states. Several visitors from Italy and Spain are already lined up to visit us in 2010. The number of Fulbright researchers who choose the Project as a destination keeps increasing: they have come from Brazil, Bulgaria, Finland, Italy, and Russia. Such a concentration of high-level doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Project is a solid indication of the Project’s reputation for good scholarship and nice hospitality. That, too, is an important part of our mission, made much easier by an expanding Institute. The constant influx of such visitors is a daily reminder to the editorial team of the permanent usefulness of our work, of the loftiness of our scholarly responsibilities, and of the trust granted us by the international philosophical community.
André De Tienne
Director and General Editor, Peirce Edition Project
7. Rosa Mayorga delivered, on behalf of Jaime Nubiola, the following report from the ad hoc International Advisory Committee:
On March 2009 the Executive Committee of the Peirce Society appointed an ad hoc committee to study the formation of an International Advisory Committee for the Society and its Transactions. It was composed by six members: Cathy Legg (New Zealand), Giovanni Maddalena (Italy), Sami Philstrom (Finland), Lucia Santaella (Brazil), Claudine Tiercelin (France), and Jaime Nubiola (Spain), who was the chair.
The charge of this ad hoc committee was to present to the Society's executive committee a list of scholars who the executive committee may then invite to join the new International Advisory Committee (IAC).
The fist step of the ad hoc Committee was to approve the following guidelines for the IAC:
The IAC will be an international group of prominent scholars of Peirce, pragmatism, and American philosophy in a broad sense who will serve the following functions:
1. To serve as a conduit for work by new scholars outside the United States, directing submissions from them to the Transactions. To the extent that they are able, committee members will attend relevant conferences and actively engage with and encourage young scholars.
2. To promote scholarship related to Peirce, pragmatism, and American philosophy, as well as to promote the Society and the Transactions, in each committee member's home country/region.
3. To advise the Society as a whole on issues relevant to scholarship on Peirce, pragmatism, and American philosophy, occurring outside the United States.
The IAC will have members from every geographic area in which there is serious interest in Peirce, pragmatism, or classical American philosophy generally. The number of its members is not limited, but it seems sufficient to choose two scholars from each country or geographic area, one senior and one junior, who could effectively develop the functions listed above. They will be appointed for a three-year term, and might be renewed while being active in accomplishing their functions.
The second step was, after a wide consultation, to prepare the list of scholars to be invited by the Executive Committee. In fact, on May the ad hoc Committee was able to send a unanimous proposal, which was received by the President of the Society on June, 29th.
Jaime Nubiola
Chair of the ad hoc IAC
8. Matthew Moore read, on behalf of Jaime Nubiola, the following report from the Nominating Committee:
The Nominating Committee, chaired by Jaime Nubiola, with Nicholas Rescher and Paul Forster as members, propose Risto Hilpinen for Vice President (2010, succeeding to the presidency in 2011), and Shannon Dea for the Executive Committee (2010-12).
Both nominations were approved and those nominated were elected unanimously.
9. Kathleen Hull expressed concern about spending Society funds in order to deal with the store of back issues of the Transactions mentioned in the report of the Executive Committee. A brief discussion of this matter followed. No changes were made to the plan set forth in the report from the President and the Executive Committee.
10. Vincent Colapietro moved that we formally commend both André De Tienne and Douglas Anderson for their outstanding work over the previous year at, respectively, the Peirce Edition Project and the Transactions—a proposal immediately accepted by acclamation.
11. Larry Laudan commended Robert Lane for the work he has done as the Society’s secretary-treasurer during 2009.
12. Larry Laudan acknowledged the incoming President, Cheryl Misak, who could not attend this meeting, and adjourned the meeting at 7:30pm.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert Lane, Secretary-Treasurer