> On Dec 28, 2016, at 3:00 PM, Gary Richmond <[email protected]> wrote: > > For many scholars, Peirce's metaphysics--perhaps especially his religious > metaphysics and what he sometimes referred to as his pre-scientific > cosmology--has been the most problematic aspect of his philosophy. > Personally, I have never found this to be the case and, indeed, I am quite > aligned with his thinking in those areas while, as I've noted here from time > to time, I arrived at my own not incongruent metaphysical and religious > positions long before I was exposed to Peirce's.
This seems right, although I personally don’t have as much problem with his speculative cosmology. However it also seems to have the weakest arguments and in a few cases some problematic assumptions. (The cosmological origin of how secondness and thirdness develop don’t seem persuasive to me) The main issue to my eyes is that Peirce seems extremely fruitful in some areas. So it’s easier to push those ideas and arguments while making as few commitments to all of Peirce’s thought as possible. Especially when talking to a broader audience. > Although Peirce once described his religious views as "buddheo-christian," I > am, for the very limited purposes of this argument, going to use a principle > of at least one school of Zen Buddhism as a foil to Christianity. I should > immediately note that I have great respect for Zen having studied apsects of > it for many years, and continue to find it to be one of the healthiest > psychologies ever invented or discovered (see Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East > and West, 1961). Zen is rich and complex, and my bouncing off this small > piece of it is nothing more than a rhetorical device I'm employing to make a > point. I’ve read just enough to be dangerous. As a tangent what do you think of Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen? I enjoyed it when I read it years ago but don’t know how others perceive it or how well it actually represents Zen. > But if this is a précis of that cosmology (while some scholars would no doubt > argue that it is not and so is misleading), then it is certainly very far > from Peirce's religious cosmology or that of Christianity more generally. As > Peirce and Christianity see it, God didn't merely 'appear' in the world to > then absolutely disengage from it (i.e., enter nirvana), but rather, He > continuously creates it, and eternally loves it. The idea of continual creation actually has a strong Jewish tradition. I don’t know if you’ve read it or not but Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil goes through the earliest creation accounts. https://www.amazon.com/Creation-Persistence-Evil-Jon-Levenson/dp/0691029504/ref=sr_1_1 <https://www.amazon.com/Creation-Persistence-Evil-Jon-Levenson/dp/0691029504/ref=sr_1_1> Levenson argues the earliest view (largely that from before Hellenization) was God continually holding back the waters of chaos by continual creation. A friend of mine writing more from the OOO perspective than the Peircean perspective has an interesting book that I think ends up being similar to Peirce’s. He comes at it primarily from the view of the philosopher of science Bruno Latour. But the idea is that grace more or less is this continual creation. It ends up being a very Buddhist like view. (He makes the Buddhist connection explicit in some of his other ritings. https://www.amazon.com/Speculative-Grace-Object-Oriented-Perspectives-Continental/dp/0823251519/ref=sr_1_11 <https://www.amazon.com/Speculative-Grace-Object-Oriented-Perspectives-Continental/dp/0823251519/ref=sr_1_11>
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
