> On Jul 2, 2016, at 5:58 AM, [email protected] wrote: > > It seems to me you evade Jerry's question, Clark. A very sensible question to > me, well worth an answer to the question, not just beside it.
I’m not sure I was evading it so much as explaining why I’m not sure it’s easy to answer with the public phenomena we have access to. But then I also confess to not being entirely clear what Jerry is asking typically. Although I do try my best to answer when I have time. > As we all know, CSP took himself to be a laboratory minded philosopher, in > contrast with seminary minded philosophers. That is, he took it as his job to > find out. And not just by reading what others had written & making > compilations out of them. > > CSP did not need a laboratory with special equipments. Everyday life was his > laboratory. Still, his experimentations on it were very, very sophisticated. I think for phenomenology (in any of its very guises) a lot is open to investigation and inquiry even if perhaps we don’t always agree. However I think Peirce also recognize that the best data was in the sciences. When one moves beyond that the data gets worse. Which is how I took his comments on immortality. Not that one couldn’t find out — presumably encountering a ghost in a testable repeatable way would do that. But rather not in the circumstances he found himself. > When you say: "Peirce’s religious views were rather idiosyncratic ...", you > say nothing. Everyone's views on any issue are idiosyncratic IF studied in > detail. In this particular context saying so sounds like you were blaming him > for being unique. - Which I do not take to be your intention, however. I just meant relative to Christianity, nothing more. Although as I tried to communicate unusual beliefs closer to deism were common in his intellectual class of that era as well. > If CSP was true to himself, then it must have been that he started with some > doubt on the immortality of the soul, BUT he ended up with finding grounds > for the belief, even though in an unorthodox way. I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Do you mean his beliefs about God or the individual soul? > And, I may add, if someone would call me a "pseudo-buddhist", I would feel > insulted. I’ve been called that enough I was passing along what I thought a funny comment. Peirce obviously isn’t Buddhist but his Christianity/deism is similar in many ways. While I’m not a deist I have plenty of beliefs similar to Buddhism in some ways as well. So the comment certainly wasn’t meant as an insult. Far from it. I find a great deal of truth in the cross-over between aspects of Buddhism and Christianity. Further I’m rather sure my own views (which are rather tangental to a Peircean discussion) would have been viewed as rather abhorrent by someone of Peirce’s class and peer group given the age he lived in.
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