> On Apr 7, 2017, at 7:40 PM, Gary Richmond <gary.richm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What you just wrote ("that the "womb of indeterminacy" is "the original
> continuity which is inherent in potentiality," and habit as "a generalizing
> tendency" emerges from that primordial continuity") reminded me that
> Aristotle's notion of potentiality is more like Peirce's idea of "would-be's"
> (3ns) than it is like the notion of simple possibility, or, "may-be's" (1ns).
>
I think this is right, although I’d add that Aristotle’s use comes from Plato
albeit modified somewhat. I think I mentioned Plato’s The Sophist before where
he talks of the lively possibility (dunamis) of being. It’s that discussion
that as I recall Aristotle uses to distinguish between potential and actual. So
the dynamic contains the possibility of being represented. Peirce of course
uses that to great effect.
I’ll fully admit that I don’t know the full history of Platonism nor all the
texts Peirce undoubtedly read. From what I can tell it was how Peirce took up
the nature of possibility that was somewhat unique that differentiated his own
thought from at least how Plato or the neoPlatonists like Proclus were normally
read. I also think it marks a big difference from Hegel, although again my
knowledge of the details of Hegel is fragmentary enough I am potentially on
shaky ground there. I believe though that Hegel sees the shift from Plato to
Aristotle as the move to see the ideas of Plato as mere potentiality. For Hegel
the focus is how the actual (which for Hegel is the real) reveals itself. So
reality or Aristotle's entelechy is the realization of the essence in phenomena.
Peirce’s move away from this nominalistic element in Hegel thus in a certain
sense a move back to taking both Plato more seriously yet retaining this view
of Plato of Hegel. (Which I assume was widely held and not limited to Hegel in
the 19th century) Of course Peirce keeps the idea of actuality but transforms
it quite a deal. What’s most interesting about Peirce, at least to me, is how
he slowly develops this more and more robust sense of modal realism.
The other thing to question, and here I’m far less confident, is where the
phrase “womb of indeterminacy” comes from. It certainly sounds like it is out
of The Timaeus where Plato calls the khora or place the womb within which ideal
forms and essences are created. My guess is that this part of “A Guess at the
Riddle” is making an explicit reference to Plato’s Khora but I may well be
wrong. A lot of those passages sound quite similar to the Platonists. For
instance,
So Plato said that time came into being with the world, but motion even before
the world’s birth. There was then no time, for neither was there arrangement,
measure or mark of division, only an indefinite motion, as it were the
unformed, unwrought matter of time. (Qu. Pl. 1007c)
> So, in several papers and on this list I have sometimes extended Peirce's
> term "would-be's" in just this direction by writing that we should think of
> potentialites as "would-be's were the conditions in place for their coming
> into being.”
This is important to note. Peirce’s shift is to see differentiation or
privation (to use the platonic term) as constraints that limit possibilities.
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