In Praise of Polymathy. CS Peirce and Art Historical Thought

It is for his polymathy - which consisted not only in broad-ranging but boundary-defying inquiry - that C.S. Peirce offers a compelling model for art history’s self-reflections on its nature and potentials. The paper sets out the chequered history of polymathy and its entwining with the emergence of the modern University in the West and the institutionalization of scholarship through discipline-formation. It analyses these historical dynamics and argues that decolonization, as the latest challenge to the presumptions of the discipline, provokes us to reflect on the nature of art historical thought and articulate the possibility of thought outside discipline. I argue that Peirce’s polymathy supplies a powerful model for this possibility.