“Don’t you think so?”

IN a passage of manuscript 636, written between the 22nd and the 30th of September 1909 and named as “Meaning” we understand the anti-Kantian stand of Peirce's late philosophy. The manuscript was one of the drafts for the alleged Preface to the new publication of the “The Fixation of Belief ” and “How to Make our Ideas Clear” on The Monist. Peirce was eager to republish the series of the Popular Science Monthly with the amendments that were the fruit of his late years of research as he wrote to Paul Carus in a letter written on January 6, 1909 (L77). He never succeeded to terminate the work, but the block of the MSS 635-(636)-637 forms a unitary paper (MS 636 is a first draft of the more complete 637), which can make us understand the direction taken by Peirce’s research in his late years. The passage is significant as one of those in which Peirce’s late realism emerges in an icastic form. In a few lines we understand Peirce’s later developments of thought, the inception of a new form of realism (1) and the kind of human responsibility that it implies (2). Finally, starting from passages like this one, it is possible to imagine a new way to consider the synthetic drive of pragmatism, far away from Kant’s patterns of thought (3).