Darrel, Gary
First to Darrel: welcome.
To both: one wouldn't call Agnes Heller a Peircean, but in her A Radical Philosophy of 1985, she characterises philosophy as the intellectual activity that is afraid neither ask nor to confront `childish questions'. In many respects, though, I think that there was something kind of childish about Peirce, right to the end (see the Essay on Reasoning in Uberty and Security in EP2), to the point that the likes of Simon Newcomb could blind him with sophistication. So what is `nothing'? I'll keep a close watch on this thread!
Cheers
Arnold
On 2/11/06, Gary Richmond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
David,
Welcome to the list. Your reasons for joining it seem to me the very best for doing philosophy, to offer a child of a new generation an approach to answering the profound philosophical (cenoscopic) questions she may have about life's meaning, and that perhaps the most promising method for arriving at true answers (or the closest we can get to this) is a communal inquiry having the value of coming out of "shared knowledge and experiences," as you phrased it. You may have come to just the right philosophical forum as this seems to me to be exactly the thrust of Peirce's pragmatism and approach to inquiry.
May I plunge right in with a challenge to your answer to your child's question, "what is nothing?" You answered: ""the stuff left when you take away everything..." Now I'm taking it that perhaps you came here because you thought (or felt) somehow that your answer needed to be validated, or further explicated, or was insufficient in some way, say only partially right or partially satisfactory, or some such thought. Now I would hazard the guess that Peirce would have suggested that your answer defines a certain kind of nothing, namely the nothing or zero of subtraction, but that subtraction is not a first process...
CP 6.211 [T]ake the continuum of all possible sense qualities after this has been so far restricted that the dimensions are distinct. This is a continuum in which firstness is the prevailing character. It is also highly primitive. . . . For zero is distinctly a dualistic idea. It is mathematically A - A, i.e. the result of the inverse process of subtraction. Now an inverse process is a Second process.But Peirce continues by commenting on "another sort of zero which is a limit."
It is true that there is another sort of zero which is a limit. Such is the vague zero of indeterminacy. But a limit involves Secondness prominently, and besides that, Thirdness. In fact, the generality of indeterminacy marks its Thirdness. Accordingly, zero being an idea of Secondness, we find, as we should expect, that any continuum whose intermediate Listing numbers are zero is equivalent to a pair of continua whose Listing numbers are 1.He illustrates these categorial ideas and relations upon which he bases his theory of continuity by means of a famous blackboard example (to be found in the last of the 1898 Cambridge Conferences lectures, published as Reasoning and the Logic of Things, edited by Kenneth Lane Ketner and with an introduction by Ketner and Hillary Putnam)..Well, to cut to the chase, out of this move comes all of Peirce's synechastic and evolutionary philosophy, his theory of the generation of the early cosmos (what I've called Peirce's alternative to the Big Bang), evolutionary love and agapasm, etc.
But it is also undoubtedly true that this original zero can be analyzed as chaos, as Peirce does at one point in the New Elements fragment currently being discussed on the list. Since his topic seems to me to be logic as semeiotic, this is represented by the blank sheet of assertion in his system of existential graphs--which, however, finally becomes the living symbol of an evolutionary cosmos within which we participate (more or less creatively, I would add).
Well, my analysis might be quite flawed, and if it is I hope it'll be corrected. Well, that is just fallibilism, and every honest seeker benefits from it. Today I simply wanted to suggest that this sort of thinking (or whatever the truer, "corrected" form of it might be), the kind of thinking that leads to a philosophy of evolutionary love might prove to be a valuable supplement to your answer to Grace's question--and perhaps even some of the questions she's yet to ask! Again, welcome!
Best,
Gary Richmond
Darrel Summers wrote:
---As the List Manager suggested I am introducing myself to the forum. My purpose for subscribing was in response to a question posed to me by my daughter Grace, age 5 years. Her question; "what is nothing?" and my answer "the stuff left when you take away everything..." led me to think more about the process of getting to nothing and the concept of beginning and end. I hope by monitoring these posts, and posting in my own non-acedemic style I might be better able to offer Grace a meaningful answer. I also would like Grace to be familiar with the value of communal / shared knowledge and experiences.Best Regards,Darrel L Summers
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