The life of significance: Cultivating ingenuity no less than signs
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Vincent Colapietro
Vincent Colapietro (1950) is Liberal Arts Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA 〈vxc5@psu.edu 〉. His principal research interests include Peirce and more generally pragmatism; aesthetic and more specifically music; theories of subjectivity and agency (including psychoanalytic approaches). Major publications include:Peirce's Approach to the Self (1989);A Glossary of Semiotics (1993);Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom (2003);“Toward a Pragmatic Conception of Practical Identity” (2004);“C. S. Peirce” in Routledge Companion to 19th Century Philosophy (2010), edited by Dean Moyar.
Abstract
Victoria Lady Welby's notion of wit plays a pivotal role in her voluminous writings and, accordingly, in Susan Petrilli's illuminating expositions of the most relevant texts bearing on this central notion. The author of this essay translates Welby's conception of wit into ingenuity and shows how this translation aids us in appreciating the salience and subtlety of Welby's notion. He also follows up on a suggestion offered by C. S. Peirce in his review of Welby's What Is Meaning? (the suggestion that the primitive mind of our remote ancestors was hardly as deficient an instrument as such theorists as E. B. Tylor and Herbert Spencer depicted this mind). Moreover, he takes seriously Welby's insistence upon the gendered character of the specific form of human ingenuity to which she devoted her greatest attention. Finally, the author notes how the cultivation of ingenuity, precisely in Welby's sense, is inextricably linked to the cultivation of signs and especially symbols.
About the author
Vincent Colapietro (1950) is Liberal Arts Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA 〈vxc5@psu.edu〉. His principal research interests include Peirce and more generally pragmatism; aesthetic and more specifically music; theories of subjectivity and agency (including psychoanalytic approaches). Major publications include: Peirce's Approach to the Self (1989); A Glossary of Semiotics (1993); Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom (2003); “Toward a Pragmatic Conception of Practical Identity” (2004); “C. S. Peirce” in Routledge Companion to 19th Century Philosophy (2010), edited by Dean Moyar.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Introduction
- Lady Welby and Lady Petrilli
- Victoria Lady Welby – A pioneer of semiotic thought rediscovered by Susan Petrilli
- The life of significance: Cultivating ingenuity no less than signs
- Mother sense and the image schema of the gift
- Signification, common knowledge, and womanhood: The significs of Lady Victoria Welby and beyond
- Science: The question of its limits
- Susan Petrilli's archival research on Victoria Welby and its implications for future scholarly inquiry
- The “dialogue” between Victoria Lady Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin – Reading Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding
- Christine Ladd-Franklin's and Victoria Welby's correspondence with Charles Peirce
- Tracing signs of a developing science: On the correspondence between Victoria Lady Welby and Charles S. Peirce
- Signs, senses and cognition: Lady Welby and contemporary semiotics
- Space and time: Continuity in the correspondence between Charles Peirce and Victoria Welby
- Significs and semiotics: Chronicle of an encounter foretold
- Hic et nunc: Evidence from canine zoosemiotics
- Lady Welby: Significs and the interpretive mind
- The translating and signifying subject as homo interpres and homo significans: Victoria Welby's concept of translation – a polyfunctional tool
- Semiosis and intersemiotic translation
- Signs, translation, and life in the Bakhtin circle and in Welby's significs
- Significs and mathematics: Creative and other subjects
- The sense, meaning, and significance of the Twin International Covenants on Political and Economic Rights
- Significal Designs: Translating for meanings that truly matter
- Mysticism and mind in Welby's significs
- On the translatability of liturgical texts: A significal perspective
- Money and metaphor in Welby Prize winner F. Tönnies' “Philosophical terminology”: Some critical considerations
- Lady Welby and logic
- Willing science – observing nature: Welby and Latour lift the veil
- In search of the other: Reading Victoria Welby's significs
- The aphasic utterance: A significal perspective
- The articulate music of language in The King's Speech
- Applying significs
- Presentation: Two texts at the beginning of a research itinerary. From significs to semioethics
- Theory of meaning and theory of knowledge: Vailati and Welby
- Sign and meaning in Victoria Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin: A confrontation
- Early recognitions of Welby's significs and the movement it inspired in the Netherlands
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Introduction
- Lady Welby and Lady Petrilli
- Victoria Lady Welby – A pioneer of semiotic thought rediscovered by Susan Petrilli
- The life of significance: Cultivating ingenuity no less than signs
- Mother sense and the image schema of the gift
- Signification, common knowledge, and womanhood: The significs of Lady Victoria Welby and beyond
- Science: The question of its limits
- Susan Petrilli's archival research on Victoria Welby and its implications for future scholarly inquiry
- The “dialogue” between Victoria Lady Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin – Reading Susan Petrilli's Signifying and Understanding
- Christine Ladd-Franklin's and Victoria Welby's correspondence with Charles Peirce
- Tracing signs of a developing science: On the correspondence between Victoria Lady Welby and Charles S. Peirce
- Signs, senses and cognition: Lady Welby and contemporary semiotics
- Space and time: Continuity in the correspondence between Charles Peirce and Victoria Welby
- Significs and semiotics: Chronicle of an encounter foretold
- Hic et nunc: Evidence from canine zoosemiotics
- Lady Welby: Significs and the interpretive mind
- The translating and signifying subject as homo interpres and homo significans: Victoria Welby's concept of translation – a polyfunctional tool
- Semiosis and intersemiotic translation
- Signs, translation, and life in the Bakhtin circle and in Welby's significs
- Significs and mathematics: Creative and other subjects
- The sense, meaning, and significance of the Twin International Covenants on Political and Economic Rights
- Significal Designs: Translating for meanings that truly matter
- Mysticism and mind in Welby's significs
- On the translatability of liturgical texts: A significal perspective
- Money and metaphor in Welby Prize winner F. Tönnies' “Philosophical terminology”: Some critical considerations
- Lady Welby and logic
- Willing science – observing nature: Welby and Latour lift the veil
- In search of the other: Reading Victoria Welby's significs
- The aphasic utterance: A significal perspective
- The articulate music of language in The King's Speech
- Applying significs
- Presentation: Two texts at the beginning of a research itinerary. From significs to semioethics
- Theory of meaning and theory of knowledge: Vailati and Welby
- Sign and meaning in Victoria Welby and Mikhail Bakhtin: A confrontation
- Early recognitions of Welby's significs and the movement it inspired in the Netherlands
