Joseph Morton Ransdell (1931-2010) was an associate professor of philosophy who worked at the university from 1974 to 2000. He is best known for his book Pursuit of Wisdom, which discusses the philosophy of wisdom. Charles Sanders Peirce was a philosopher who wrote extensively about representation. His theories are important for understanding how we process information. He was also interested in Socrates and Plato’s teachings.
A native of Oklahoma City, Ransdell received his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California in 1961. He subsequently obtained his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in New York City, where he wrote his dissertation on Peirce. Before joining Texas Tech, Ransdell taught philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Santa Barbara, and then spent a year in San Luis Potosí, Mexico to write his book Pursuit of Wisdom.
He founded the Charles Sanders Peirce website, “Arisbe: the Peirce Gateway”, which encourages online philosophical discussion, designed to provide a centralized access point to all web resources related to the life and works of Charles Sanders Peirce. In 1993, he founded the PEIRCE-L Philosophical Forum, with 400 members from three dozen countries. This forum is designed for those interested in the philosophy and applications of Peirce.
In the last few decades of his life, Joseph Ransdell experimented with the communicative process of philosophy by using recent technological developments and imagining what he called a telecommunity, a world-wide community centered especially on the ideas of Charles S. Peirce. To help facilitate the Peircean scholarship, he created the Arisbe website and the peirce-l email forum.
At the same time, Ransdell continued his own philosophical investigations into such topics as the sign’s determination by the object, and iconicity in relation to the symbol. While Ransdell’s vision of a growing TV community has yet to be fully realized, it is alive and well and remains an exciting challenge for those interested in continuing his truly forward-thinking experiment.
