Hello, all,
In 1977, John McDermott told our class ("classical American philosophy"),
"When Alfred North Whitehead got to Harvard he read some of the Peirce
papers that Hartshorne and Weiss were editing. Whitehead said 'If we had
seen Peirce, Russell and I would not have bothered'".
That's not solid documentation -- McDermott could spin out great stories --
but it seems to be a variation of the same story that Sherburne told.
Regards,
John Welch
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Burtt [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2014 2:00 AM
To: Peirce List
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce Trumps Whitehead?
There's some of what came later in Whitehead's work to be found in The
Concept of Nature, written while he was still in England. Am I correct that
he would have had fairly little chance to have run into Peirce's work at
that point?
-- Brian Burtt
> On Aug 6, 2014, at 8:39 PM, Kelly Parker <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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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