First European Pragmatism Conference Università Roma Tre 21 September 2012 What a Scientific Metaphysics Really is (according to C. S. Peirce) Jaime Nubiola 1 (University of Navarra, Spain) jnubiola@unav.es [Text of Oral Presentation] "The metaphysics of our best contemporaries lacks but little of the rank of a science". Charles S. Peirce, CP 2.9, c.1902 As some of you know, Charles Sanders Peirce stayed in Rome three times over the course of his life. These visits took place during his first European trip on the occasion of the American expedition to observe the solar eclipse in Sicily on the 22nd of December of 1870. There are two delightful letters from his first stay in October: one of the 14th of October to his mother and another of the 16th to his Aunt Lizzie describing with pleasure his visit as a tourist to the "City of the Soul", as he calls Rome, using the expression of Lord Byron 2 . We have —at least up to now— no documents relating to his second stay (around 1-8 of December) with his wife Zina and other members of the expedition in their trip to Sicily, but we have detailed information about his third stay between the 1st and the 8th of January of 1871 thanks to his diary from those days. Rome was suffering from the alluvione of the Tiber of the 28th of December, registered on the walls of Piazza Navonna and in several other places. During my last stay in Rome, invited by Prof. Rosa Maria Calcaterra, I had the chance to follow with her some of the footsteps of Peirce through Rome. I will not go now into details, but I want to bring your attention to a text of his that we have chosen as a motto for the project of our Grupo de Estudios Peirceanos on Peirce's European correspondence and which seems to me specially suited to this Conference: Philosophy is a study which needs a very protracted concentrated study before one [...] begins to be at all expert in the handling of it, if one is to be precise, systematic, and scientific. I gave ten years to it before I ventured to offer half a dozen brief contributions of my own. Three years later [1870], when I had produced something more elaborated, I went abroad and in England, Germany, Italy, Spain, learned from their own mouths what certain students at once of science and of philosophy were turning in their minds. (C. S. Peirce, Letter to The Sun, MS 325, p. 4, c.1907). In the last fifteen years I have paid a great deal of attention to Peirce's visits to Europe. Although those trips were a mixture of scientific research and tourism, the study of Peirce's documents of those years has somehow transformed my understanding of his thought. It 1 I want to express my deepest gratitude for Prof. Giovanni Maddalena's invitation to take part in this panel on Peirce's epistemology and metaphysics in the First European Pragmatism Conference celebrated at the Università Roma Tre. A few paragraphs of sections 1 and 2 come from my paper Nubiola (2005b). I am indebted with Dr. Erik Norvelle for polishing my English, with Ainhoa Marin for her help with the ppt, and with Howard G. Callaway for his suggestions. 2 Both letters are available at <http://www.unav.es/gep/Roma14.10.70.html> and <http://www.unav.es/gep/Roma16.10.70.html>. All corrections and suggestions —particularly from Roman readers— will be very welcome!