Reyes Cárdenas, Paniel, Scholastic Realism: A Key to Understanding Peirce’s Philosophy, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018, 238 pp.

El libro de Paniel Reyes Cárdenas (2018), Scholastic Realism/ A Key to Understanding Peirce’s Philosophy (Oxford: Peter Lang Ltd.) 238p. en la que se explican algunas de las ideas nuevas que dicho enfoque sobre la filosofía pragmatista y realista de Charles Sanders Peirce generan. La lectura de dicho libro definitivamente impondrá un nuevo rumbo en el entendimiento de dicho filósofo norteamericano. También se hacen algunas reflexiones sobre los paralelismos entre el trabajo del autor, el de Edith Stein y el del novohispano Antonio Rubio sobre el tema de los universales.

Meaning Redefined

From the point of view of semiotics, the essential contribution of John Deely consists in having made us all aware of the richness of the Scholastic heritage, and to have explained it to us latter-day semioticians. Even for those, who, like the present author, think that semiotics was alive and well between the dawn of the Latin Age, and the rediscovery of Scholastic realism by Peirce, the notions coined by the Scholastic philosophers are intriguing. To make sense of scholastic notions such as ens reale and ens rationis is not a straightforward matter, but it is worthwhile trying to do so, in particular by adapting these notions to ideas more familiar in the present age. Starting out from the notions of Scholastic Realism, we try in the following to make sense of the different meanings of meaning, only one of which is the sign. It will be suggested that there are counterparts to ens rationis, not only in the thinking of some contemporary philosophers, but also, in a more convoluted way, in the discussion within cognitive science about different extensions to the mind. The recurrent theme of the paper will be Deely’s musing, according to which signs, unlike any other kind of being, form relations which may connect things which are mind-dependent (ens rationis) and mind-independent (ens reale). The import of this proposition is quite different if is applied to what we will call the Augustinian notion of the sign, or to the Fonseca notion, which is better termed intentionality. In both cases, however, mind-dependence will be shown to have a fundamental part to play. Following upon the redefinition of Medieval philosophy suggested by Deely, we will broach a redefinition of something even wider: meaning even beyond signs.

Peirce’s Post-Kantian Categories

In Peirce’s terminology to be actualised means to exist. Existence falls within the category of Secondness which is intermediate between the purely qualitative presence of Firstness and the lawfulness of Thirdness in the triad of categories of being based on Kant’s list which he substitutes for the traditional Aristotelian and Scholastic decad. This substitution tallies with Scholasticism in that the argument by some Schoolmen for the reality of universals is succeeded by Peirce’s argument for the metaphysical reality of power and law. Passing from Peirce’s theory of categories to his theory of signs, a passage that is analogous to ones made by Scotus, in Heidegger’s treatise on Scotus, and in Locke’s Essay, we come upon the difficulty of reconciling Peirce’s assertion that the interpretant of a sign can be in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum with his assertion that it is possible to reach the ‘entire general intended interpretant’, ‘the very meaning’. Steps toward a dissolution of this problem are made by recognising the huge part played in Peirce’s theory by the would-be and the if-then of counterfactual conditionality, and by heeding the fact that the meaning is not the finite or infinite series, but a habit or practice conveyed by the series, hence not the sort of thing of which it makes sense to ask whether it is finite or infinite. What in opposition to nominalism Peirce calls his Scholastic realism and his pragmaticism are foreshadowed in the emphasis put on willing and doing by Scotus and Hopkins in their analyses of being.

Interiority and Human Experience: Dominicus de Flandria on the Interior Senses

This paper takes up the topic of the interior senses and sensible cognition as elaborated by Dominic of Flanders, a fifteenth-century Dominican thinker, in his short commentary, Expositio super libros De anima. At a time when Averroistic Aristotelianism was flourishing, and as nominalism spread across the Continent, Dominic’s account of the soul and the interior senses demonstrates a commitment to Thomas Aquinas and, more broadly, scholastic realism. Dominic adopts the fourfold model of the internal senses advanced by Thomas. He carries forth Thomas’s insistence that the sensus communis is both the root (radix) and end (terminus) of sensitivity as such and the individual senses; he follows Thomas in privileging the cogitativa, and posits a more perfect form of memoria in man. Our study concludes by looking briefly at his Quaestiones in XII libros Metaphysica, where we find an innovative account of experimentum, which reveals the thought of a capable philosopher.

Pragmatic Diction:Owen Barfield, the Inklings and Pragmatism

Owen Barfield (1898-1997) has been a very eclectic writer: poet, novelist, and philosopher. Though almost unknown to philosophy scholars, his thought has been very influential on the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and it is worth being studied, understood, and used in connection with pragmatism. His philosophy amounts to a strong metaphysical realism that can parallel Peirce’s view of scholastic realism and, more generally, the pragmatist attitude toward a comprehension of reality based on continuity. Moreover, Barfield sustains a view of knowledge as ‘participation’ that is very close to Peirce’s understanding of knowledge as representation. Finally, he proposes a form of ‘synthetic’ reasoning that goes the same direction as many classical pragmatists’ attempts. Therefore, the threefold philosophical aim of this paper is (1) to introduce Owen Barfield’s main theories, (2) to show the parallel between Barfield’s and pragmatists’, and especially Peirce’s tenets, and (3) to show how pragmatism and Barfield’s theory can be reciprocally useful Men do not invent those mysterious relationsbetween separate external objects,and between objects and feelings or ideas,which it is the function of poetry to reveal.These relations exist independently, not indeed of Thoughtbut of any individual thinker. (Poetic Diction, 79)