Jack: When I took a Whitehead seminar with Donald Sherburne in grad school I was likewise struck by the similarities between Peirce and Whitehead, and asked him about it. The fact that ANW was at Harvard was especially interesting--Peirce had to be in the air, at least, but as far as I know, ANW scarcely mentions CSP by name.
Sherburne told me a story from the time Hartshorne and Weiss were editing Collected Papers. They brought some manuscripts to ANW to get his advice on their meaning, or their importance, to determine whether they ought to be included in the edition. I was under the impression these were some of Peirce's writings on synechism and cosmic evolution, but I'm not sure that's a correct impression--it's what I was working on at the time so I may have heard what I expected to hear. Sherburne said that Whitehead looked over the pages, set them down, and asked Hartshorne and Weiss to tell the world that this was the first time he had ever seen these papers. He recognized the similarity to his own thought, and how it might look to posterity. Some others at the recent Peirce Congress said they had heard versions of this same story. A similar story, which I heard at the Congress, tells that H & W had brought a Peirce manuscript to ANW for his advice, but he was not in. They left it on his desk assuming he would know what it was and why they had left it. When ANW came in he mistook it for a student paper, read it, and got very excited to think that some undetected genius in one of his classes had written it! I don't know whether either of these stories is documented anywhere--though I hope they are, and that they are related better than I can do, by somebody closer to the source. My own conclusion on the matter, after long consideration, was that the similarities between ANW and CSP are real, but that there was no unacknowledged influence from CSP to ANW. ANW was brilliant, knowledgeable, and original in his own right, and he was no plagiarist. I think both philosophers were seeking to solve some similar problems using similar resources, at about the same historical time. As a result of this they arrived at very similar solutions. Peirce actually remarks on this kind of simultaneous discovery in science, and considers it as supporting his view that knowledge belongs to the community rather than the isolated individual inquirer. -- Kelly A. Parker, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy, Environmental Studies, & Liberal Studies Grand Valley State University phone (616) 331-3257 Allendale, MI 49401 [USA] fax (616) 331-2601 http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu ________________________________________ From: Jack Curtis [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, August 03, 2014 6:30 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce Trumps Whitehead? On reading a collection of Peirce's writings in parallel with Whitehead's "Process & Reality" I'm struck with the similarities between them, even to the point of suspecting Whitehead cribbed most of his ideas from Peirce, perhaps desperate to salvage his reputation after the "Principia Mathematica" fiasco with Russell, altho his only reference to Peirce in P&R is to dismiss the idea that we think in symbols as "absurd" & diss Peirce as a pea-brained logician who can only see the world in black & white, rather than the colorful rainbow emerging out of a myriad of miniscule relationships that it is. Recognizing that the similarities I see may, at least in part, be a result of reading the 2 in parallel, interpreting what Whitehead says in the light of my interpretation of what Peirce has just said, & vice-versa, I'm wondering what you all might think of Peirce v Whitehead?
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