Following is an offline note endorsing my note that endorses Jerry's note about the upcoming talk on Friday, which emphasizes the importance of Peirce's writings for our time (the 21st C).
Basic point: Peirce was writing for the future. Those of us who value his contributions should emphasize his contributions to his future, which is our present. John ---------------------------------------- Sent: 4/7/24 10:36 AM To: John Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> Subject: FW: [PEIRCE-L] Zoom lecture on the CSP's role in philosophy of science (U Pitt) John, I harbor a suspicion, perhaps more like a fantasy, that had Peirce’s ‘pragmaticism’ carried the day against James & Dewey, logical and empirical positivism and the ‘linguistic turn’ wouldn’t have established the beachhead in philosophy of science that has pretty clearly, imho, led to the global existential crisis we’re facing today at the event horizon of mass extinction. Similarly, perhaps if Karl Popper had succeeded more widely in his opposition to the “Scientific World Conception” of the Vienna Circle in his day and since, the affinities of those two men’s philosophical views would have led to a radically different paradigmatic foundation of the sciences than the ‘value-free’ paradigm that apparently remains entrenched nearly a century later. I imagine Kuhn would agree we’re long overdue for a revolution. In this paragraph from his 2021 article on Peirce in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rober Burch seems to report some similar thoughts about Peirce’s perspective … An especially intriguing and curious twist in Peirce’s evolutionism is that in Peirce’s view evolution involves what he calls its “agapeism.” Peirce speaks of evolutionary love. According to Peirce, the most fundamental engine of the evolutionary process is not struggle, strife, greed, or competition. Rather it is nurturing love, in which an entity is prepared to sacrifice its own perfection for the sake of the wellbeing of its neighbor. This doctrine had a social significance for Peirce, who apparently had the intention of arguing against the morally repugnant but extremely popular socio-economic Darwinism of the late nineteenth century. The doctrine also had for Peirce a cosmic significance, which Peirce associated with the doctrine of the Gospel of John and with the mystical ideas of Swedenborg and Henry James. In Part IV of the third of Peirce’s six papers in Popular Science Monthly, entitled “The Doctrine of Chances,” Peirce even argued that simply being logical presupposes the ethics of self-sacrifice: “He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively.” To social Darwinism, and to the related sort of thinking that constituted for Herbert Spencer and others a supposed justification for the more rapacious practices of unbridled capitalism, Peirce referred in disgust as “The Gospel of Greed.” All merely hypothetical or purely conjectural, of course. But your admonition to relate Peirce to our 21st century world nudged me into sharing the idea. From: peirce-l-requ...@list.iupui.edu <peirce-l-requ...@list.iupui.edu> On Behalf Of John F Sowa Sent: Saturday, April 6, 2024 5:53 PM To: Jerry LR Chandler <jerry_lr_chand...@icloud.com>; Peirce List <PEIRCE-L@list.iupui.edu> Subject: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Zoom lecture on the CSP's role in philosophy of science (U Pitt) Jerry, Thanks for that note. The following sentence shows why we need to relate Peirce's writings to the latest and greatest work that is being done today: >From the abstract: "C.S. Peirce, however, is not generally considered a >canonical figure in the history of philosophy of science." I have attended a few APA conferences where I gave a talk in a Peirce session and attended other talks in more general sessions. And I have not heard anybody mention Peirce (except me in the discussions after a talk). The logicians are constantly talking about Frege, despite the fact that nobody else had ever used his notation for logic. But they don't mention Peirce, despite the fact that every logician uses his algebra of logic (with minor notational changes by Peano). In fact, the reason why Peano changed the notation was for ease of publication. Peirce used the Greek letters, sigma and pi, for the quantifiers, which were rarely available in those days. But any typesetter could easily turn letters upside down and backwards. So instead of mentioning Peirce, they give credit to Peano for the algebraic notation. It's essential for Peirce scholars to relate his writings to the big, wide, modern world. Susan Haack does that very well. Some others do that. And it's essential for Peirce scholars to do much, much more to relate Peirce's work to the hot topics of the 21st century. Peirce himself expected his writings to be hot issues for 400 years. We're almost halfway there, and we need to heat up the discussions. John -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Jerry LR Chandler" <jerry_lr_chand...@icloud.com> Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Zoom lecture on the CSP's role in philosophy of science (U Pitt) FYI JLRC Friday, April 12th @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EDT This talk will also be available live streamed on: Zoom at https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94576817686 Title: Peirce Disappears: C.S. Peirce and Early Logical Empiricism Abstract: Scholars of the history of philosophy of science read and hear a lot about Duhem, Mach, Poincaré, and the members of the Vienna Circle. C.S. Peirce, however, is not generally considered a canonical figure in the history of philosophy of science. But in the early years of the logical empiricist movement in the United States, Peirce received a warm reception from prominent representatives, proponents, and sympathizers of logical empiricism including Charles Morris, Ernst Nagel, Herbert Feigl, Phillip Frank, and W.V.O. Quine. This reception was short-lived though and Peirce gradually disappeared from the mainstream philosophy of science while logical empiricism turned into a formidable movement. In this talk, I begin by discussing examples of the early reception of Peirce’s philosophy in the works of Morris, Nagel (and his student Justus Buchler), Feigl, and Frank. I show the variety of topics (including logic, probability theory, theories of truth and meaning, and social dimensions of science) in which Peirce received a warm (though not uncritical) reception. We see that the engagements with his works are persistent from the late 1920s to the 1950s and get more refined over time. I then provide some explanations for the eventual marginalization of Peirce in mainstream philosophy of science.
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