> On Jun 30, 2016, at 8:35 PM, Jerry Rhee <jerryr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Do you find my previous writing to be religious or theological? > > For instance, if I were to ask "what would God be?", > would that question not fit neatly into the previous argumentation?
When you start talking God or Trinity there’s a lot of theological and philosophical assumptions one brings in. Add in that Peirce’s religious views were rather idiosyncratic - much more on the deist side of things but maintaining a significance of the Trinity but with an odd pseudo-Buddhist like twist - and I just don’t feel I know enough about the assumptions to say much. I’m religious myself but my own religious views are rather unlike Peirce’s. By and large from what I could see Peirce couldn’t bring himself to believe in anything like an interventionist God. (For quite reasonable epistemological reasons I might add - he just didn’t appear to have much by way of religious experience and distrusted the ability of the masses to interpret their religious experiences) When you raise the question of God it inevitably gets into whether you see the very sense of God determined primarily by the Greek philosophical tradition - where God is ultimate cause or even Being itself. However there’s a strong opposing view as well that sees God much more as a person and therefor much more at odds with Greek absolutism tendencies. At a minimum this opposing view is driven more by religious experience, however naively interpreted it may often be. This tension can be found throughout Christian history as well as Jewish history. And certainly prior to the rise of philosophy both Greek religion and Jewish religion was far more anthropomorphic in religious beliefs. (Zeus or Jehovah are more like people, with emotions and involvement in various ways with humanity rather than absolutely Other — arguably Judaism started picking up the more absolutist conceptions during the Hellenistic conquest of the near east by Alexander and then more so with Roman control of the region) So the question “what would God be” brings with it a slew of historical and theological questions and presuppositions. In Peirce’s intellectual class of the 19th century deism, platonism (Emerson) and Hegelianism tended to define respectable intellectual religion. Peirce, to my admitted limited eyes, seems largely caught up with the religious views of his peers. In the 20th century this shifts although much of the shift is nominalistic. That is people still tend to believe the same sorts of things about interventionist deities, miracles, and grounds of existence but over time divorce it from religious language. Often the distinction between a deist and an atheist is purely over language and how much they dislike being connected rhetorically with organized religion. This continues until the 1980’s when there was a somewhat countermove in Continental philosophy where typically self-avowed atheists return to religious language. But the influence of that culturally seems minor. And there always were religious thinkers such as Levinas or Marion but the fact they can enter into dialog so well with atheists in their own traditions shows their religion is still compatible with that fuzzy deist/atheist distinction. I’ll confess my own views see tying grounds of being (in any of its guises or meanings) with God to not be terribly fruitful. So it’s just not a topic I’m interested in unless it relates to specific philosophical questions (say with understanding Spinoza or Hegel). Outside of how the Neglected Argument helps illuminate abduction and Peirce’s notion of reality, I’m just not aware of the significance of his religious beliefs. I’m not even convinced his ontological beliefs (a fairly neoplatonic cosmological origin, the ontology of swerve as tied to consciousness, etc.) necessarily affect his other beliefs such as the pragmatic maxim or his semiotics.
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