Acknowledgments
The genesis of this project was a conversation with Dinda Gorlée a few years ago in Thessaloniki, Greece. Since the late 1980s, when Dinda and I first met at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, we have shared a passion for the great intellect of Charles S. Peirce. In Thessaloniki, we discussed Peirce’s lexicography, a topic I have thought about off and on for over thirty-years. Later we would come to agree that it would be a great fit for the Brill book series, Semiotics: Signs of the Times, edited by Gorlée. I’d like to thank her for supporting this collection of Peirce’s writings in her Brill series.
Speaking of Indiana, I would be remiss not to acknowledge some of the other individuals who shared with me their knowledge of Peirce both at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I was a graduate student, and the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, where I was a research assistant for several years. In Bloomington, there was Héctor-Neri Castañeda, Karen Hanson, and Paul Vincent Spade from the philosophy department, who listened to me endlessly talk about Peirce; and in Indianapolis, there was André De Tienne, Max H. Fisch, Nathan Houser, and Christian J.W. Kloesel, who shared with me the vast resources of the Peirce Edition Project. One of the great joys of this project was being able to reconnect a bit with André and Nathan, who like Dinda, I have known since the late 1980s.
I would also like to thank the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at the University of Houston-Victoria for their generous research support for this project. Special thanks especially to its Director, Angela Hartmann, for her professionalism and administrative support.
Research for this volume was conducted at the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University, Indianapolis, and the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University. I’d like to thank the directors of the Peirce Edition Project, André De Tienne and the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, Elize Bisanz, for facilitating the arrangements and for helping me to navigate their collections and resources. Also, thanks to Kenneth Laine Ketner in Lubbock, and Nathan Houser in Indianapolis, for their assistance during the respective visits.
Marco Di Leo provided me with research assistance at the Peirce Edition Project and the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism. His skills as a data scientist enabled me to organize a massive amount of research material into a navigable set of documents. For this, I am most grateful.
Doan Lac Thien provided me with research assistance at the University of Houston- Victoria. His skills as a computer scientist were invaluable in solving the various challenges and problems associated with transcribing Peirce’s work for Baldwin’s Dictionary. I am most appreciative of his dedication to this project, and his willingness to do what was necessary to provide the best possible representation of Peirce’s work.
In addition, I’d like to express my gratitude to Bruce Wilshire for opening up the world of American philosophy to me. As an undergraduate philosophy student at Rutgers University, he was my mentor and teacher. In his course on American philosophy, we read selections from Justus Buchler’s Philosophical Writings of Peirce (1940), which included a chapter entitled “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs.” This piece, which blew me away at the time, was a composite of selections from a variety of pieces including Peirce’s entries on “Sign” and “Index” for Baldwin’s Dictionary, which are included in the present volume. Thus, this project—to borrow from T.S. Eliot—has allowed me to arrive where I started and to know this place just a little bit better.
Finally, as always, I would like to thank my wife, Nina, for her unfailing encouragement, support, and patience.