> On May 9, 2016, at 1:45 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote: > > I read Peirce primarily for his insights into logic, mathematics, > and science, which are considerable enough for several lifetimes, > and I read him the same way I read other thinkers in those areas. > Maybe some people read Peirce as Charles the Revelator, applying > the principles of scriptural interpretation and chasing his tale > around hermeneutic circles in hopes of cornering a sublime truth. > Scientific texts are read a different way. There we have a line > between two kinds of statements, those that serve as conjectures, > heuristics, or suggestions and those that are proved (or proven).
I think there are two things to get straight. History of philosophy which hopefully tries to figure out how particular thinkers understood terms. That’s useful because often readers of their texts get things wrong. The difficulty is that of course people are hardly always consistent (particularly in notes) and are also fallible. So there are always debates about what is a mistake, what place private notes ought play, and what place a few particular sentences ought have in understanding larger texts. Frequently the authors are underdetermined. i.e. we can’t be sure what they mean. Sometimes this leads to radically different readings of the philosopher. (My favorite example is the middle Heidegger on the question of whether he’s an idealist or realist on the basis of one small paragraph in Being and Time) Now history of philosophy can lead to productive engagements with philosophers. However I tend to agree it gets pushed too much. Philosophy has a long history of productive use of misreadings - both in terms of positively misreading or reacting to a position that is often a misreading. (Strawmen boogeymen like how Descartes, Plato, Logical Positivists or others are great examples of the latter)
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