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CFP for special Issue on 'The Second Metaphysical Club and its Impact on the Development of American Science and Philosophy'
Special Issue of Perspectives on Science
GUEST EDITORS: Jean-Marie Chevalier, Amirouche Moktefi and Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen
Submissions invited for a special issue devoted to the Second Metaphysical Club and its impact on the development of American sciences and philosophy. The volume is expected to appear online in 2015 and in print in 2016.
The importance of the Harvard (the first) Metaphysical Club has been widely recognised. Though scientifically more influential, the Johns Hopkins (the second) Metaphysical Club has not received equal attention. A detailed history of this second club, organised by Charles S. Peirce from 1879 until 1885 at the Johns Hopkins University, is yet to be written. Yet the Minute Book of the Club shows that in less than six years there were 43 meetings in total in which 110 presentations were delivered.
The second Metaphysical Club has a good claim of having been one of the most important interdisciplinary gatherings of philosophers and scientists in the 19th-century United States. Its speakers and attendees represented a number of disciplines. Notable participants and speakers included Peirce and his students: Ellery W. Davis, John Dewey, Fabian Franklin, Benjamin Ives Gilman, Joseph Jastrow, Christine Ladd(-Franklin), Allan Marquand, Oscar H. Mitchell, Washington Irving Stringham (mathematics), Henry Taber and Josiah Royce.
The scientists who met there included Adam T. Bruce (biology), James McKeen Cattell (psychology), Henry Herbert Donaldson (neurology), Henry Laurence Gantt (engineer), Basil L. Gildersleeve (classics), G. Stanley Hall (psychology), Edward Mussey Hartwell (physiology), Newell Henry Martin (zoology), George S. Morris (philosophy), Waldo Selden Pratt (musicology), Ira Remsen (chemistry), William T. Sedgwick (bacteriology), Benjamin Eli Smith (editor), Albert Harris Tolman (English), Lester Frank Ward (sociology) and Edmund Beecher Wilson (genetics). All were pioneers who shaped the development of American science and its methodology, the mutual influence between science and philosophy, and the future of higher education.
We welcome submissions that address the history and the general influence of the Johns Hopkins Metaphysical Club. Suitable contributions could focus on:
- Peirce and his students,
- the individual philosophers and scientists who took part in the Club’s meetings,
- their work and place in the history of the disciplines in question,
- Peirce’s influence on their thinking and on the logic and methodology of science,
- the Club’s wider significance from the points of view of philosophical, scientific and intellectual ideas,
- Metaphysical Club and the late 19th-century ideas on interdisciplinary research,
- Metaphysical Club and the idea of scientific communities in the late 19th-century America,
- ...
Submissions should be sent to: peirce.workshop [at] gmail.com no later than March 1st, 2015.
Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with journal formatting guidelines: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/sub/posc
Submissions should not exceed 7500 words and must be prepared for blind review.
For enquiries, please contact the guest editors at peirce.workshop [at] gmail.com.
Perspectives on Science is devoted to studies on the sciences that integrate historical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives. Its interdisciplinary approach is intended to foster a more comprehensive understanding of the sciences and the contexts in which they develop.
Each article appearing in Perspectives on Science will provide the reader with at least two of the three perspectives on their subject. Each issue aims at articles which range over case studies and theoretical essays of a meta-historical and meta-philosophical character. The journal fosters historiographical works combining social and institutional analyses of science, as well as analyses of experiments, practices, concepts, and theories. All papers consist of original research drawing upon the most recent scholarship. The Board of Advisory Editors is deliberately drawn from a wide range of subdisciplines within history, philosophy, and sociology of science.