Just discovered this dude after listening to
and after looking him up he sounds like a secret final boss of philosophy. How do I go about reading this muttboi? Apparently he wrote sporadic papers and left no coherent compendiums or longform works.
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That's funny because I literally just came up with a nice reading list.
I can give you a brief list of essays:
>On a New List of Categories (the beginning nucleus)
>The Fixation of Belief
>How to Make Our Ideas Clear
>Man's Glassy Essence
>The Law of Mind
>The Doctrine of Necessity Examined
>A Guess at the Riddle
>The Harvard Lectures (1903) (probably the most cohesive of all of Peirce's thought)
>Letters to Lady Welby
>A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God
Prioritize the developments of later Peirce over earlier Peirce. The nucleus of his thought emerges early but it takes a considerable amount of time to mature into its glorious semi-conclusion. If Peirce contradicts himself or is unclear, try to see what he says later on. Despite being a bit scatter-brained due to the nature of his hectic life and the lack of the privilege of "sitting down" to write his magnus opus, he's usually aware of the problems in his thought and eventually sorts himself out.
Key Ideas:
>Peirce's brutal attack on Kantianism through Kantianism (no intuitions, no introspection, the simplification of the Table of Categories, the rejection of the thing-in-itself and the turn towards phenomenology, etc.)
>the "cenopythagorean" categories (first, second, third)
>the Peircean reduction thesis
>precision/prescision/precission/etc., and its link to the categories (especially predication)
>hypostatic abstraction, and its link to the categories (how Peirce's thought "explains" itself in a beautifuly way)
>objective idealism (how Peirce rehabilitates Scotist realism to make a "realist" pragmatism)
>"il lume naturale" (important if you're confused about "what's left?" after Peirce destroys Kantian intuition)
>reasoning: abductive, deductive, and inductive; corollarial and theorematic
>tychism, synechism and agapism (evolutionary metaphysics)
>Peirce's thoughts on mathematical continuity (if you can hack it, though there are helpful secondary sources that discuss this at an educated layman's level)
>Peirce's semiotics (his most famous work, but unarguably derivative of his metaphysics, phenomenology, and logic)
>Peirce's agnosticism on questions regarding ontology (e.g., substance, individuals, being, etc.)
>Peirce's rejection of the rest of American pragmatism and his crusade against "nominalism"
>the community of inquiry
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In addition, if you REALLY want to do a deep dive, then I highly recommend that:
1) You are familiar with Plato, especially when it comes to his later writings (e.g. Parmenides, Philebus, Statesmen, the Sophist) dealing with the generation of numbers, the Great and the Small, the Measure and the Mean, and the method of division (diaeresis).
2) You are well-acquainted with the corpus of Aristotle, especially the Organon and Metaphysics, having done some thought in trying to "unify" them together. If you can speak intelligently about whether the Categories are linguistic or ontological, I think you're in good hands.
3) You are well-acquainted with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, especially with the nitty-gritty, "mechanical" sections like the Table of Judgments and the Table of Categories. You don't need to read the Critique of Judgment, since Peirce apparently never read it, but you'll see that it ends up seguing well with some of Peirce's independent thoughts on aesthetics thanks to influence of Schiller's "play drive" on young Peirce.
4) You are somewhat familiar with the "best hits" of Scholastic philosophy, namely Aquinas, Scotus, and Suarez. If you understand terms like entia res, entia rationis, first intentions, second intentions, etc., and you're familiar with the problem of universals, then I'd say you have enough of a background.
This background knowledge will take you right into Peirce's intellectual neighborhood.
Finally, I highly recommend that you're familiar with the basics of grammar, linguistics, and modern formal logic, as it will help you process what Peirce is trying to do, which is to perform philosophy in such a way where it explains how "everything", in a broad sense, "hangs together", in a broad sense. A little preparatory work here goes a long way, since it'll give you the tools to view the categories, the reduction thesis, and hypostatic abstraction in a way that will make it seem like a logical analysis and not a weird, if not surprisingly apt, mystical system. You'll also be able to parse what Peirce is doing with his "logic of relatives" and especially his idiosyncratic but brilliant "existential graphs", which are quite fascinating and might teach you things about logic you never fully recognized.
At some point in the future, I might compile a list of secondary sources that I felt are worth their bang for their buck in understanding what Peirce is doing. But for now, this Philosign video, although extremely basic, is a good start:
Best of luck in studying Peirce, who I believe is by far the best philosopher America has produced and easily one of the best philosophers the modern west has ever produced. It'll give you a second license on philosophy that you didn't think was possible.
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Unexpected effortpost, thanks my homie saving these
No worries. The funny thing is I just fleshed this stuff out in another thread kek. So it was pretty easy, just copy paste and clean it up a bit.
>explains how "everything", in a broad sense, "hangs together", in a broad sense
are you a Sellarsgay?
No, I generally avoid analytic philosophy, I just like the quote. Peirce can be kind of thought as an analytic philosopher, especially in style, but his autism-meter is finely-tuned to strike at the heart of reality instead of bickering over superfluous questions, so I tolerate it.
>I generally avoid analytic philosophy
oh thank goodness. carry on then.
>his hectic life and the lack of the privilege of "sitting down" to write his magnus opus
he was a poorgay?
kind of. he had means but he wasted it all away through extravagant spending. the real problem is that he never became a tenured professor
I read Harvard lectures first, on a new list of categories will filter anyone hard
that is good advice, but I have to warn that most Peirce writings will filter people hard.
the ones that don't are deceptively simple because they're written in plain English (as plain English as fin-du-siecle English gets) but cover topics whose complexity isn't eminently visible to an untrained eye at first.
>muttboi
What does it imply
He's American
I've enjoyed secondary sources using Peicean semiotics to explain linguistic phenomenon. I'll see if I can remember some reccomendations.
Peirce was amongst the first to describe abductive reasoning and his contributions to the thinking of his more well known friends like William James are underrated.
>Secret boss
Dude he's in every history of philosophy textbook, he's not obscure at all
Note how whoever keeps posting these never posts excerpts. Very telling.
Notice that this anon Redditposted with his reply. Very telling.
>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/22325389#p22340118
Still buttmad about the last time?
Anon... I hate to break it to you, but you might have schizophrenia. There never was a "last time."
Post some Perice excerpts.
I will when you figure out how to stop Redditposting.
>mfw reality can't stop scurrying away
Well, anon, I don't like posting excerpts because it's a pain to format them, but you figured out how to stop Redditposting. So I must oblige.
>Modern science has been builded after the model of Galileo, who founded it on il lume naturale. That truly inspired prophet had said that, of two hypotheses, the simpler is to be preferred; but I was formerly one of those who, in our dull self-conceit fancying ourselves more sly than he, twisted the maxim to mean the logically simpler, the one that adds the least to what has been observed, in spite of three obvious objections: first, that so there was no support for any hypothesis; secondly, that by the same token we ought to content ourselves with simply formulating the special observations actually made; and thirdly, that every advance of science that further opens the truth to our view discloses a world of unexpected complications. It was not until long experience forced me to realise that subsequent discoveries were every time showing I had been wrong, while those who understood the maxim as Galileo had done, early unlocked the secret, that the scales fell from my eyes and my mind awoke to the broad and flaming daylight that it is the simpler Hypothesis in the sense of the more facile and natural, the one that instinct suggests, that must be preferred; for the reason that unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.
>A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God