Vincent Colapietro

Professional Bio

Areas of Specialization

• American philosophy
• Semiotics
• Peirce

Recent Courses

• Exploring Questions Regarding Evil
• American Philosophy Seminar
• Subjectivity

Recent Publications

Most Recent Book

• • Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom: John William Miller & the Crises of Modernity (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003).

Recent Edited Volume

• • John William Miller’s The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, & Community, edited by Joseph P. Fell, Vincent Colapietro, & Michael J. McGandy (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005)

Recent Articles

• “Signs of Illness/Pathologies of Interpretation” (forthcoming) in Illness in Context: Archeology, Phenomenology, & Clinic, edited by Drude von der Fehr
• “Engaged Fallibilism: Between Alterity and Sociality” in The Pragmatic Century: Conversations with Richard J. Bernstein, ed. Sheila Greeve Davaney & Warren G. Frisina (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006).
• “Reflective Acknowledgment & Practical Identity: Kant & Peirce on the Reflexive Stance” in Semiotics & Philosophy in Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Rossella Fabbrichesi & Susanna Marietti (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), pp. 128-57.
• “Democracy as a Moral Ideal.”  The Kettering Review, volume 24, number 3 [Fall 2006], pp. 21-31.
• “Toward a Pragmatic Conception of Practical Identity” [Presidential Address to the Charles S. Peirce Society].  Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly in American Philosophy, volume 42, number 2 [Spring 2006], pp. 173-205.
• “Tradition, Dialectic, & Ideology: Contemporary Conflicts in Historical Perspective.”  ACPQ, volume 80, number 2 [Spring 2006], pp. 253-66.
• “Practice, Agency, & Sociality: An Orthogonal Reading of Classical Pragmatism.”  International Journal for Dialogical Science, volume 1, number 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 23-31.
• “Cultivating the Arts of Inquiry, Interpretation, & Criticism: A Peircean Approach to Our Educational Practices.”  Studies in Philosophy & Education, 24 [2005], pp. 337-66.
• “Conjectures concerning an uncertain faculty claimed for humans.”  Semiotica, 153-1/4 [2005], pp. 413-30.
• “Striving to Speak in a Human Voice: A Peircean Contribution to Metaphysical Discourse” [Presidential Address to the Metaphysical Society of America].  The Review of Metaphysics, volume LVII, number 2 [December 2004], pp. 367-98.
• “Signs and their vicissitudes: Meanings in excess of consciousness and functionality.”  Semiotica, 148-1/4 (2004), pp. 229-43.
• “Foreword” to Kory Spencer Sorrell’s Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism, & Feminist Epistemology(Fordham University Press, 2004), pp. xi-xx.
• “C. S. Peirce” in Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, edited by Armen Marsoobian & John Ryder (Blackwell, 2004), pp. 75-100.
• “The Question of Voice & the Limits of Pragmatism: Emerson, Dewey, & Cavell.”  This essay first appeared in Metaphilosophy, volume 35, numbers 1 & 2 (January 2004), 178-201,and later in a book entitled The Range of Pragmatism & the Limits of Philosophy, edited by Richard Shusterman (Blackwell, 2004), 174-96.
• “Toward a truly pragmatic theory of signs: Reading Peirce’s semeiotic in light of Dewey’s gloss” in Dewey, Pragmatism, & Economic Methodology, ed. Elias L. Kahlil (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 102-29.
• “Portrait of a Historicist: An Alternative Reading of Peircean Semiotic” [Presidential Address to the Semiotic Society of America].  Semiotics 2003, ed. Rodney Williamson, Leonard G. Sbrocchi, & John Deely (NY: Legas, 2005), pp. 3-12.
• “The Practice of Inquiry: Charles Sanders Peirce, 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism” in The Classics in Western Philosophy, edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia, Gregory M. Reichberg, & Bernard N. Schumacher (Blackwell, 2003), pp.453-59.
• “Translating Signs Otherwise” in Translation Translation, edited by Susan Petrilli (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 189-215.
• “Bebop as historical actuality, urban aesthetic, and critical utterance.” Philosophy & Geography, volume 6, number 2 (August 2003), pp. 153-65.
• “The Loci of Creativity: Fissured Selves, Interwoven Practices” in Manuscítica: Revista de Crítica Genética (junho de 2003), II, pp. 59-82.  This is a revision of a paper presented as a keynote address at “Poética da Criação” [VII Encontro Internacional de Pesquisadores do Manuscrito].  Universidade Federal Fluminense (Niterói, Brazil).  October 1-19, 2002.
• “Guerra e Democracia” (translation by Fernando Andatch).  Revista Fronteiras – estudos midiáticos (junho de 2003), volume V, number 139-52.  This article grew out of a talk given on March 14th, 2003, at the annual meeting of SAAP (Denver, CO).
• “Love & Death - & Other Somatic Transactions.”  Hypatia, voume 17, number 4 (Fall 2002), pp. 162-72.
• “Nous pour ne esquisse de la théorie peirceanne de l’inconscient” in Questions de sémiotique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), sous le direction de Anne Henault, avec la collaboration de David Savan, Drude von der Fehr, Jean-Claude Pariente, pp. 703-22.  This is a translation of a slightly revised version of “Notes for a Sketch of a Peircean Theory of the Unconscious,” originally published in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society (Summer 1995), volume XXXI, number 3: 482-506.
• “Introduction” to, and selection of texts in, section on Charles S. Peirce in Revised Edition of Classical American Philosophy (NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), edited by John J. Stuhr

Current Projects

• Psyches and Their Vicissitudes
• An attempt to stage a mutual interrogation between pragmatism and psychoanalysis