Tullio Viola is going to present a working paper on 'Articulate Reason and Its Elusive Background. Notes on the Late Royce’s Reading of Peirce'

This article is my contribution to a collection of papers on Hans Joas’s book Die Macht des Heiligen which is currently being edited by Bettina Hollstein, Matthias Jung, Wolfgang Knöbl and Magnus Schlette (forthcoming 2019). I take my cue from the second Chapter of Joas’s book, which examines the philosophy of religion of William James against the backdrop of Josiah Royce’s semiotic criticism of it. I then focus in particular on the source of Royce’s semiotic insights, namely Charles S. Peirce. My overall claim is that, while Royce succeeds in bringing to the fore Peirce’s sophisticated understanding of reason as an interpretive and semiotic faculty, it fails to do full justice to Peirce’s remarks about what we might call the inarticulate and experiential ground out of which articulation unfolds. I try to draw some implications from this reading that touch both on Joas’s interpretation of Royce and on the more general question of the relation between experience and articulation from a pragmatist angle.