I had heard that Peirce had contributions to make to the study of logic, even of mathematics. Did he really conflate the notion of "an eternal truth" with "spirit" in this way? If someone speaks to me about eternal truths, I expect them to provide me with the sentences that they consider to be "eternally true". The only consciousness involved in this exchange is that of judgement of these same sentences and comparison of judgement, and this consciousness is the same as judges not only so-called "eternal truths" but also transient truths, analogies, jokes, and any other kind of sentence. Why should consciousness of a so-called "eternal truth" be more "spiritual" than consciousness of a so-called "transient truth", or of a ribald joke? From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Benjamin Udell What a confused person I am today. My supposed link to "Immortality in the Light of Synechism" - from 1893, not 1887 - was a link to something else, an earlier piece - that _was_ from 1887 - when Peirce was less sure about immortality. I should know better. Sorry about that! Best, Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: Benjamin Udell Dear Gene, list, You're quite right! I forgot about that. Occasionally I forget where I'm not quite on the same page with Peirce. In Peirce's technical sense in "Questions on Reality" (1868) http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/logic/ms148.htm, a general individual is in one place at a time, and not confined to one point and date. You could think of a rock that way. That's how I think of people, too, with what some call "genidentity," identity through time. But Peirce goes farther, for example in his "Immortality in the Light of Synechism" (1887) http://books.google.com/books?id=V9wPAAAAYAAJ <http://books.google.com/books?id=V9wPAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA69> &pg=PA69 and CP 6.548-56. He held there that there is also social consciousness: one's spirit really does live on in others; and there is also spiritual consciousness, which we confuse with other things, and in which one is constituted as an eternal truth "embodied by the universe as a whole": that eternal truth "as an archetypal idea can never fail; and in the world to come is destined to a special spiritual embodiment." (quoting a little of myself from Wikipedia). Best, Ben
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