> On Nov 20, 2016, at 1:38 PM, Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com> wrote: > > You may recall that I concluded my message which began this thread with this > question: can anyone on the list offer some Peirce quotations which might > help quickly clarify his views on democracy? >
I searched the CP and the word only appears once in CP 1.654. But it doesn’t appear too helpful. Common sense, which is the resultant of the traditional experience of mankind, witnesses unequivocally that the heart is more than the head, and is in fact everything in our highest concerns, thus agreeing with my unproved logical theorem; and those persons who think that sentiment has no part in common sense forget that the dicta of common sense are objective facts, not the way some dyspeptic may feel, but what the healthy, natural, normal democracy thinks. And yet when you open the next new book on the philosophy of religion that comes out, the chances are that it will be written by an intellectualist who in his preface offers you his metaphysics as a guide for the soul, talking as if philosophy were one of our deepest concerns. How can the writer so deceive himself? I confess that I’m never quite sure what people mean by democracy. It’s used in so many unclear ways that it’s usually less than helpful unless carefully unpacked and qualified. Often what people mean by it is a set of practices like rule of law, free voting, and a lot else. Yet then it gets reduced to mere voting without the social norms required behind the voting. (I think we saw that in Iraq where providing the vote was insufficient to provide democracy as most understood it) As to Peirce’s political views. I always took him as a kind of Burkean conservative, although it’s not something I studied much.
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
