Thank you very much for the reference on "Peirce's anti-intuitionist polemic"!
I had never been really clear on the separation of simple physiological
intuition from modernist claims of 'intellectual' intuition until Umberto Eco
clearly spelled it out for me contrasting Aquinas medieval aesthetics with
Maritain's modernist aesthetics which, in my old age, I have grown extremely
uncomfortable with. Peirce's "sign", "signified" & "interpretant" as more
ambiguously delineated in Aquinas' "cognitum est in cognoscente per modum
cognoscentis" ("the known is the knower in ways peculiar to the knower") but
stated in Peirce's precise ontology as:
-x-
"Careful analysis shows that to the three grades of valency of indecomposable
concepts correspond three classes of characters or predicates. Firstly come
"firstnesses," or positive internal characters of the subject in itself;
secondly come "secondnesses," or brute actions of one subject or substance on
another, regardless of law or of any third subject; thirdly comes
"thirdnesses," or the mental or quasi-mental influence of one subject on
another relatively to a third." ('Pragmatism', CP 5.469, 1907)
-x-
It would be interesting to assemble all the similar formulations in the history
of philosophy to Peirce's statement here which, to me, touches on every
absolutely necessary element for establishing an ontology over and above a
subordinate epistemology - I am having trouble phrasing this- wherein, if I can
get it right, you first simply need a knower - the primordial literal presence
of intellect - secondly, the "brute action" that forces the focused attention
of the "knower" - and thirdly the thoroughly ambiguous "quasi" nature of
intellection that is yet somehow a sort of "third party" to the gathering. You
need an "I" to 'know' or rather just basically physiologically perceive, the
only valid "animal intuition" Aquinas admits - something that forces you to pay
attention - and then "judgment" somehow constructed to make sense of THAT
situation of knower and known, of "firstness" and "secondness" that 'puts them
together' in "thirdness". I am trying to
be as literally crude as possible. Does it make sense?.
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