> On Jan 30, 2017, at 12:28 PM, Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > Regarding #2, once again you insist on assigning a pejorative label to my > view. It is not Platonic, it is Aristotelian (and Peircean), since I clearly > and consistently affirm that 3ns does not exist apart from 2ns (and 1ns). > Reality, being whatever it is regardless of what anyone thinks about it, is > not limited to existence, reacting with the other like things in the > environment.
I think we’re at the stage where our categories break down somewhat and the semantics get convoluted. For instance what does “exist” mean in that sentence? The assumption that platonists think forms *exist* requires a lot of unpacking about how we use the term exist for instance. > On Jan 30, 2017, at 12:05 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote: > > As for point #2, of course the reality of laws can't be reduced to their > existences; that would be akin to reducing Thirdness to Secondness - and I > certainly don't accept that. BUT, in contrast to your view, I don't agree > that Thirdness can exist 'per se'; they 'exist' only within an individual > articulation. Again, Peirce was an Aristotelian, not a Platonist - and your > view is Platonic. I think many scholars dispute the claim that Peirce was more Aristotelian than Platonic. But again a lot needs to be unpacked since it’s not as if those terms are themselves clear. There were lots of different sorts of Platonists. Especially by the period of late antiquity the two figures were often read of in an unified way. Get into the medieval era, especially during the rediscovery of Aristotle and it gets even more complex due to corrupt or falsely attributed texts. Also incentives to not veer too far out of the mainstream and be labeled heretical meant Aristotle was often read Platonically (or vice versa). Anyway I’m not sure the labels platonist or Aristotelian are helpful unless we unpack what we mean by those terms. Take something simple like the forms. You might say the forms are the perfect cause of the objects instantiating the forms or you might say the forms are bundles of possibilities with limits on what is possible. How one conceives of the forms radically changes the type of platonism one engaging with. To my eyes Peirce saw possibilities, especially limited possibilities, as the platonic forms and was a realist towards them. That, to my eyes, makes Peirce a platonist of a sort. Likewise the fact that an object of type T wasn’t perfectly like T was acknowledged by both Plato and Aristotle. I’m not sure it tells us much. So Peirce’s notion of ‘swerve’ for instance is compatible with both views. While labeling can help, especially if we can establish Peirce was reading certain texts to help arrive at his own thinking (Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, Mill, Descartes, etc.) one can push labels too far. They can also be distorting (especially when some figures like Plato or Descartes are often understood only in terms of a certain polemic strawman).
----------------------------- 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 .
