Community Unlimited A Peircean Analysis of Otherness, Inquiry, and Individualism (original) (raw)

Some Observations On C.S. Peirce

2014

Explicates some key ideas of Peirce's pragmatism by considering in detail an excerpt from “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man.”

Developing from Peirce's late semeiotic realism

Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words, 2014

But Peirce also made important discoveries within the fields of chemistry, optics, geodesy, astronomy, metrology, and psychology (as maybe the first American experimental psychologist (Cadwallader 1979)). Furthermore, Peirce is largely appreciated for his contributions to modern logic (Putnam 1982: 290-301) and the methodology of science as well as different branches of philosophy (Fisch 1986: 422-448). Peirce was a systematic philosopher (Murphey 1993; Anderson 1995a)-or an architectonic thinker, like Aristotle, Kant or Hegeland in a draft to the book "A Guess at the Riddle" (c. 1898) he wrote the following: Thus, in brief, my philosophy may be described as the attempt of a physicist to make such conjecture as to the constitution of the universe as the methods of science may permit, with the aid of all that has been done by previous philosophers. (CP 1.7). Peirce was trained in the chemical laboratory and was saturated with the spirits of the physical sciences (CP 1.3), but, inspired by the pre-Socratic philosophers, he also tried to understand the universe at large (CP 4.375), and he considered it to be permeated with signs and processes of signification (CP 5.448, note 1; CP 4.551). Hence, Peirce defended a pan-semiotic view of the universe; to him, the universe was a great argument, simply and solely (CP 5.119), and thereby intelligible or reasonable (CP 1.615; Potter 1997: 202; Sørensen, Thellefsen & Brier 2012: 106-117). The universe can be known by man; and man can only think and communicate by signs (CP 5.251), himself, in fact, being a sign (CP 7.583; Singer 1984: 53-73). Therefore, Peirce saw the urgent need for developing a thoroughgoing theory of signs, a semiotic, and in a letter from 1908 to the English philosopher of language, Lady Victory Welby (1837-1912), he looked back on his intellectual preoccupation and stressed how:. .. it has never been in my power to study anything,

The Philosophical Relevance of Peirce’s Historical Studies

The Oxford Handbook of Charles S. Peirce, 2024

The chapter explores the different uses of history that emerge from Peirce’s writings and asks to what extent history, from a Peircean perspective, is relevant to philosophy. It starts by looking at the emergence of Peirce’s interest in history as part and parcel of his polymathic profile. It goes on to analyze history’s role in the development of Peirce’s evolutionary account of the human mind. Finally, it explores the relationship between history and logic. Peirce was interested both in exploring history’s bearing on the investigation of logical questions and in employing his logical theories to elaborate a methodology of historical inquiry.

Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture

1998

Ochs' book, originally published in hardback in 1998, is an extensive survey of the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce. It is addressed not only to Peirce scholars or professional philosophers, but also to audiences within other fields of research, such a literary studies and theology, with the goal to 'contribute to their practice of reading Peirce, rather than to the specialized scholarship on Peirce.' (11) Its guiding thought is that pragmatism should be understood not as a break with modern philosophy in the broadly Cartesian-Kantian vein which prevails in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, but rather as a corrective to this tradition's tendency to treat its problems in overly abstract ways. To take Peirce's message to heart involves learning how to read texts (and traditions) correctively, and in that process explicate, draw on, and possibly revise a philosophical tradition's rules for correcting itself. Ochs thus stresses the continuity between Peirce's thought and the philosophers he criticizes more than is common among most Peirce scholars. [2] Focussing on Peirce's four series of writings on pragmatism and pragmaticism (1867-8, 1877-8, 1902-3 and 1905-6), Ochs makes two important claims: first, the already mentioned continuity with his philosophical predecessors, and second, that Peirce's development itself can be viewed as a process of continuous correction of his own earlier standpoints, culminating in his pragmaticism of 1905-6. [3] To carry out his task, Ochs spends considerable time on the development of a method of how to read texts in general, and Peirce's writings in particular. This is understandable, because for Ochs, it is not only a method suitable for understanding Peirce's development, but also a method that helps clarify Peirce's relation and contributions to the Cartesian-Kantian tradition which he criticizes, but nevertheless is part of. First of all, a text should be read as it wants to be read: this means that the primary task of the reader is to grasp what is really there, in the explicit text, a task which, although it does require knowledge of the tradition it belongs to, is nevertheless relatively straightforward. However, any text will always contain openness to interpretation, obscure passages and inconsistencies, something that calls for a pragmatic reading, which is 'a method for discovering an implicit text within the explicit text.' (24) Ochs here draws a parallel to Paul Grice's concept conversational implicature and develops a parallel concept of textual