> On Sep 19, 2016, at 9:14 AM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> wrote: > > Clark- thanks for your very nice outline of the NA - I certainly agree with > your view, that as Chiasson says, it's not just about a 'belief in God', > because it's not deductive but is, as noted, abductive. Abduction inserts > freedom and spontaneity - attributes outside of the range of a God. And > agreed - the NA doesn't offer 'compelling reasons for why we should call this > ens necessarium as god. I, as an atheist, prefer his outline of Mind as the > ens necessarium. > > As Mind is an action of Reasoning [within all three modes], then, I think > that ethics is grounded within it. You don't, in my reading, require a God, > for ethics.
It’s worth noting the connection here between Peirce and Spinoza. Of course that could be indirect since many of the early German idealists like Hegel were highly influenced by Spinoza. But I’ve long thought the direct influence was significant. For a good paper on the influence see http://www.commens.org/sites/default/files/biblio_attachments/peirce_and_spinozas_pragmaticist_metaphysics.pdf Spinoza of course explicitly calls his unity God and ties it to ethics. However the Jewish rabbis disagreed and thought him an atheists leading to his excommunication. That gets again to my point that the *name* God seems to be the dispute rather than the content. That said though many post Peircean figures strongly want to call God as God while giving his nature freedom and spontaneity. The process theology movement that started with Whitehead being the most obvious philosophical example although there were others. Later process theologians were explicitly influenced by Peirce despite many of Peirce’s writings being difficult to find at the time.
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