European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, III-2 | 2011

Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics: Some Consequences of Kant’s Critiques in Peirce’s Early Pragmatism, 2011

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 2004

Semiotica

In my work on Kant’s Transcendental epistemology, I criticize his three Critiques and show that none of them can solve the problems that Kant endeavored to solve and he even, in a way, admitted it. In the first Critique, Kant attempts to solve the difficulties of the Cartesian Idealism and Humean Empirism, in combining them mechanically in his own Transcendental formalism and Sensual matter without being able to bridge the gap between them. In the second Critique, Kant endeavored to make his Practical Reason of the a priori pure fact of formal morality into free moral conduct to materialize his ideal commonwealth of ends, but he could not bridge this gap. In his third Critique, Kant attempted to make the aesthetic reflective judgment of beauty objective, including of artworks, but failed to do so. The Peircean pragmaticist method can save the theory of knowledge both from the dogmatism of the metaphysical realists and from the inconsistency of the phenomenalists and holists. Peirce ...

Signs of logic , 2006

ÖÐ × Ë ÒØ Ó Ë Ò Ö× È Ö (b. 1839), son of the mathematician Benjamin P., brought up in a circle of physicists and naturalists, and specially educated as a chemist, derived his first introduction to philosophy from the K.d.R.V. [Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781] and other celebrated German works, and only later made acquaintance with English, Greek, and Scholastic philosophy. Accepting unreservedly Kant's opinion that the metaphysical conceptions are merely the logical conceptions differently Kant's table of functions of judgment as culpably superficial.

In his 1868 ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ and ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ Peirce famously rejected the possibility of having intuitions. He defined an intuition as ‘a cognition not determined by a previous cognition of the same object’ or as a ‘premiss not itself a conclusion.’ The rejection of intuitive knowledge can thus be seen as an expression of Peirce’s enduring conviction that our knowledge is by nature inferential. Even though the main polemical target of these papers is surely Descartes, Peirce specifies in a footnote that he nearly uses the word intuitive ‘as the opposite of discursive cognition,’ and that this ‘is also nearly the sense in which Kant uses it.’ Peirce’s position seems thus to be quite radical in his rejection of the Kantian distinction between intuitive and discursive cognition, between intuitions and concepts. I show that Peirce, despite this opposition to the Kantian distinction in his early writings, retained and developed in a totally new way some of its essential features in his mature semiotic. In fact, Peirce’s famous distinction between icons, indices, and symbols can be read as having functions similar to those reserved by Kant for the distinction between intuitions and concepts. In this framework, the tasks that Kant attributed to intuitions are performed by indices and icons.

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2011

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A …, 2009

The purpose of this paper is to offer a distinct contribution to recent attempts to understand Peirce’s normative thinking. Scholars have interpreted the real tensions in Perice's normative thought by conflating passages from different moments in the development of his philosophy. Extracts from Peirce’s famous 1898 lectures (when he dismissed ethics as useless) are frequently combined with later passages from 1902 onwards, when he changed his mind. This paper proceeds by tracing the growth of Peirce’s thinking about ethics and correlating his conflicting positions with his theory of the categories. The approach offered here is diachronic. A diachronic approach is necessary to correct some efforts to resolve the inconsistencies in Peirce’s moral theory. Also, a categorical account is understood as essential to perceive the inner coherence of his moral philosophy and to support the view that Peirce moved from a nominalist to a realist position in ethics. By connecting Peirce’s conceptions of ethics to his theory of the categories I hope to have provided a better understanding of the structure of his normative realism.

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

's first account of ethics was enunciated in the second half of the 1890s, when he was almost sixty years old; and it was quite dismissive (CP 1.50, 1896). 1 His second, positive view of ethics came shortly after (CP 8.158, 1901). The fact that it took Peirce many years to write about ethics and that he changed his mind in a relatively short period of time perhaps explains why his moral writings have not been taken seriously. 2 This picture, however, has been recently challenged by a group of scholars who developed a growing interest in Peirce's normative thinking. 3 The purpose of this paper is to offer a distinct contribution to recent attempts to understand Peirce's normative thinking. I want to trace the growth of Peirce's thinking about ethics from dismissing it as a "useless" and "dubious" kind of knowledge to reviewing it as a major philosophical concern; and to illustrate my argument I will show how his conflicting positions appear to correlate with his theory of the categories. While a diachronic approach will be necessary to correct some efforts to resolve the The Origin and Growth of Peirce's Ethics