PRAGMATISM AND THEOLOGY: BETWEEN HASDAI CRESCAS AND CHARLES PEIRCE (original) (raw)
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Charles Peirce's Unpragmatic Christianity: A Rabbinic Appraisal (1988)
["Charles Peirce's Unpragmatic Christianity: A Rabbinic Appraisal," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 9 Nos. 1 & 2 (Jan-May 1988): 41-73.]
The great American philosopher, Charles Peirce, calls his pragmatism a continuation of Jesus' teaching, "Ye may know them by their fruit," and labels his cosmology a doctrine of "Christian Love." Nonetheless, I have found Peirce's understanding of Christianity to be surprisingly unpragmatic. Peirce's pragmatism itself displays an unpragmatic side and the tension between his pragmatic and unpragmatic tendencies reappears in his philosophic theology. I am not certain what a consistently pragmatic Christian theology would look like, but I know pragmatism is the rule rather than the exception in rabbinic Judaism, that is the classical, post-Biblical Judaism of the Talmud. In this paper, therefore, I evaluate Peirce's pragmatism and his Christian theology from the perspective of the rabbis.
Towards a Doctrinal Pragmaticism: Charles S. Peirce and the Nature of Doctrine
Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 2022
In this paper, I aim to retrieve insights from the philosophy of the polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, which he referred to as pragmaticism. What Peirce is perhaps best known as is the father of pragmatism. In order to differentiate his project from those of other thinkers such as William James and John Dewey, who likewise referred to their projects as pragmatism, he renamed his pragmatism to pragmaticism. Peirce’s pragmaticism has much to offer theologians, especially concerning the field of theological method. I demonstrate this claim by showing the usefulness of two of Peirce’s pragmaticist concepts. The first section of this paper briefly explicates the foundational concepts of pragmaticism, which are the pragmatic(ist) maxim, the semiotic nature of all understanding, and fallibilism. The second section of this paper provides a sketch of the benefits these three concepts have for theological method.
Contemporary and classical Theological realism seems to converge with an ontology that worries about how to describe the world in terms of formal structures, or, to connect with the philosophical tradition, universals. When it comes to the question whether the objects of a faith have an ontological consistency (and how it does so) a structuralist wonders how a feasible account can be achieved by the means of our possible inquiries, as for example, it is in the case of mathematical structures who lack phenomenical character. The realist, though, faces the problem of accounting for the entities beyond the phenomenical character and still pervasive to our conceptual ammunition. A universal, thus, lacks phenomenical character and nonetheless is necessary in order to make sense of our best scientific theories in the extent of accounting a One-over-many behaviour that is necessary if induction truly works. Universals then, are real in the sense that they are independent of our idiosyncratic ways of conceive reality, they reflect elements of recalcitrant experience. Drawing on the work of the pragmatistic realism of Charles Sanders Peirce, I want to point out a similar explanation of universals with regards to faith and the description of the ontological furniture of the elements of religious experience. They indeed appear to claim for fundamental human experiences that eventually can crop out even from common sense and instinct, they will appear if we inquire well enough and long enough in the quest for understanding the reality of God and the elements of philosophical theology. Scepticism about philosophical theology along with theological anti-realism and nominalism relinquish to engage with the metaphysical aspects of a faith. As opposed to that trend, I aim in this essay to address some fundamental premisses necessary to tackle the debate properly.
2011 Shook - Peirce's pragmatic theology and Stoic religious ethics
Charles S. Peirce believed that his pragmatic philosophy could reconcile religion and science and that this reconciliation involves a religious ethics creating a real community with the cosmos and God. After some rival pragmatic approaches to God and religious belief inconsistent with Peirce's philosophy are set aside, his metaphysical plan for a reconciliation of religion and science is outlined. A panentheistic God makes the best match with his desired conclusions from the Neglected Argument for the reality of God, and this God is also capable of fulfilling the pragmatic role demanded by Peirce's ethical expectations for the intelligent functioning of religion. The discussion proceeds to an elaboration of the aesthetic, metaphysical, and ethical elements of Peirce's philosophical system, which indicate why Peirce's religious ethics is best categorized as akin to Stoicism, with some Christian elements. For Peirce, religious ethics proceeds from the (potentially universal) agapic community's cooperation with God's loving creativity of the universe.
Charles S. Peirce on Science, Religion, and God
The paper examines Charles Peirce’s take on the relation between science and religion. What defines science, for Peirce, is inquiry inspired by a genuine, unobstructed desire to find answers to the questions one raises, and he called this the scientific attitude. In contrast, the religions he was familiar with tended to identify themselves with certain views that one was not allowed to question. Though this caused some to say that religion, to be meaningful, should embrace the scientific attitude, Peirce argued that that science as well as religion should find their original inspiration in an open, reverend wonder.
The Journal of Religion, 2022
This article suggests that certain interpretive trajectories within Jewish tradition – both halakhic (nomos) and aggadic (narrative) – can be illuminated vis-a-vis classical American pragmatism (CAP). Contrary to a prevalent belief, Peirce, James, and Dewey were neither anti-metaphysical nor anti-traditional. They contended, in different ways, that the ‘pragmatic maxim’ (PM) – “truth is what works” in James’s phrasing – is not a narrowly instrumentalist truth test. The PM rather implies that ideas and beliefs (philosophical and religious alike) should be examined against their worldly consequences. After a clarification of this relational idea in its pragmatist philosophical context, and an introductory sketch of the appearances of the PM in Jewish tradition, the article examines the PM within the thought of Rabbi Ḥayyim Hirschensohn (RḤH; 1857-1935). The article runs as follows: Section 1 presents CAP and clarifies what the PM is. Section 2 offers a bird’s eye mapping of the application of the PM within Jewish tradition. Section 3 briefs RḤH’s intellectual biography and elaborates on his pragmatist premises and his application of the PM. Rather than conceiving divine commandments as an arbitrary dictate, RḤH viewed them as purposive, relational, and as constituted and reaffirmed by individual and collective human agreements. Finally, the article reflects on the theological-intellectual prerequisites for the application of the PM.
Charles S. Peirce’s Centenary (1839-1914): Anti-Nominalism, Judgment, and Religion
Cornelis de Waal1 D uring much of his life, Peirce was an active scientist who contributed to a wide variety of disciplines while exhibiting a deep interest in philosophical questions and the logic of inquiry. Peirce's conception of what constitutes science was a broad one. Rejecting that science could be defined in terms of its method-the so-called scientific method-Peirce defined science in terms of the attitude with which one engages in inquiry. An inquiry is scientific, Peirce argued, when it is engaged in with a desire to have one's questions answered without any preconceived notion of what the answer should be ; it is an inquiry with no holds barred. In Peirce's view, this outlook stands in stark contrast with what he found in religion. The religions Peirce was exposed to tended to define themselves in terms of a creed, doctrine, or dogma-a set of answers that were not up for discussion. Whereas science, as Peirce envisioned it, should embody a single and open community freely inquiring into the world-finding answers no matter what free inquiry will bringreligion resembled an archipelago with on each island a community defined by its creeds and separated from the others by inhospitable waters. Christian creeds are largely shaped by interpretations of the Bible or, in the case of Catholicism, by pronouncements of the Church. They can be confined to the supernatural, as when it is said that there is a single God composed of three persons, or to the moral, as in the doctrine of original sin. However, they can also pertain to the natural world, and thus directly compete with science, as in the claim that the universe is less than 10,000 years old, or that dinosaurs roamed among the early descendants of Adam. Such dissimilarities notwithstanding, Peirce saw science and religion as springing from a single desire : to make sense of the world wherein we find ourselves. In this brief paper I try to say something about the relationship between science, religion, and God along Peircean lines. 2