On Apr 14, 2014, at 8:39 AM, Sungchul Ji <[email protected]> wrote:
> Recently I chanced to read the first few pages of a recent book on > Heidegger who is supposed to be phenomenologist, but the book never > mentioned Peirce's phenomenology (or phaneroscopy) who preceded Heidegger > by half a century. Was there any influence of Peirce's semiotics on > Heidegger's philosophy ? If memory serves believe Heidegger mentions Peirce once. I’m trying to find the reference but my Google-fu seems to be failing me. One should remember that until relatively recently most of Peirce’s philosophy really wasn’t well known. So for example Whitehead encounters Peirce more from private files available to him at Harvard. Both Dewey and James were simply much better known than Peirce. Further American philosophers typically didn’t have a good reputation in Europe before the war. Post-Heideggarian phenomenologists do engage more with Peirce. For instance Derrida in On Grammatololgy says Peirce comes closest to deconstruction than anyone. (Primarily Peirce’s conception of the symbol - things get more tricky with indices and icons) The closest quote I could find of Heidegger in my notes was this quip about Dewey. “Dewey is not worthwhile; his thought lacks philosophical substance. [...] Americanism…is an as-yet-uncomprehended species of the gigantic… [...] The American interpretation of Americanism by means of pragmatism still remains outside the metaphysical realm.”(99, The End of Philosophy, tr Joan Stambaugh quoted in Rescher,Collected Papers II, 77) I should add that one should be very careful assuming that when two figures talk of phenomenology they are speaking of the same thing. Heidegger’s phenomenology is quite different from his mentor’s Husserl’s phenomenology. (They actually tried to write an entry on phenomenology for the Encyclopedia Brittanica with somewhat hilarious results) While I think there are a lot of parallels between Peirce’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s not everyone agrees. Complicating this is that there are different takes on Heidegger including a fairly pragmatic version of Heidegger. (With various disputes about whose Heidegger is right) Throw in other major phenomenologists like Gadamer, Merleu-Ponty, Derrida, and others and things get quite a bit more complex.
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