> On Oct 29, 2015, at 9:06 AM, Benjamin Udell <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think that I'd agree with Kant's remark "That philosophy which mixes pure > principles with empirical ones does not deserve the name of philosophy...." > if by "philosophy" one takes him to mean pure philosophy, or pure cenoscopy > in Peirce's sense, as opposed to applied philosophy/cenoscopy, which can get > into questions such as that of the evolution of living beings from material > systems as understood by the special sciences (a.k.a. idioscopy), and so on.
In one sense this seems almost true by definition. That is if we’re doing an analysis that depends upon keeping straight phenomena from necessary conditions. On the other hand as I’ve discussed here before I tend to agree with Quine that Kant’s division is deeply problematic in practice. By practice I don’t mean just applied philosophy (although I’m unsure what we mean by that). It seems to me that the very separation between logical supports and empirics is itself a kind of applied philosophy that breaks down when we consider philosophy in more abstract. That’s not to say the opposition isn’t frequently useful. It’s worth considering pure cenoscopy as a logical issue. Just that in more epistemological or even ontological senses the opposition doesn’t seem firm. But maybe what I’m really questioning isn’t the “pure principles” vs. “empirical principles” so much as “applied philosophy” and “pure philosophy.” Peirce discusses something related in “The Basis of Pragmaticism in the Normative Sciences” (chapter 27 in EP emphasis mine). Two meanings of the term “philosophy” call for our particular notice. The two meanings agree in making philosophical knowledge positive, that is, in making it a knowledge of things real, in opposition to mathematical knowledge, which is a knowledge of the consequences of arbitrary hypotheses; and they further agree in making philosophical truth extremely general. But in other respects they differ as widely as they well could. For one of them, which is better entitled (except by usage) to being distinguished as philosophia prima than is ontology, embraces all that positive science which rests upon familiar experience and does not search out occult or rare phenomena; while the other, which has been called philosophia ultima, embraces all that truth which is derivable by collating the results of the different special sciences, but which is too broad to be perfectly established by any one of them. The former is well named by Jeremy Bentham’s term cenoscopy κοινοσκοπι the lookout upon the common), the latter goes by the name of synthetic philosophy. Widely different as the two sciences are, [they are] frequently confounded and intertangled; and when they are distinguished the question is often asked, “Which of these is the true philosophy?” as if an appreciation of one necessarily involved a depreciation of the other. In the writer’s opinion each is an important study. Cenoscopy should be that department of heuretic science which stands next after Mathematics, and before Idioscopy, or special science; while Synthetic Philosophy, the subject upon which Francis Bacon, Auguste Comte, William Whewell, and Herbert Spencer have left us admirable works in their several ways, stands at the head of the Retrospective Sciences. Is this what you’re getting at? In your list from the original post you have cenescopy as one division within the science of discovery. I’m not sure where you see Kant fitting in here though. I assume it’s the same divide but I’d be interested in seeing if you think so. In your list of taxonomy these are separated by science of discovery and science of review. However some might see applied philosophy more as practical science, your third category. To me Kant’s dictim seems more about the divide between mathematics and cenoscopy. If so, then does “pure cenoscopy” mean something more mathematical? Sorry for my being so confused. Despite my misgivings about Peirce’s project here, I do think that keeping the categories separate is useful even if I think our inquiry in practice won’t be so neat. For Quine the concern with Kant was more epistemological than categorical.
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