Zhuangzi, Peirce, and the butterfly dreamscape: concentric meaning in the Qiwulun 齊物論

Waking from a vivid dream, the sage finds himself lost between worlds of possibility and ultimately transformed. Zhuangzi’s famous butterfly story may seem familiar, but the text-linguistic structures of its broader interpretive context are little discussed and poorly understood. In this paper I argue that the Qíwùlùn 齊物論 chapter, like so many other ancient writings, is composed in a concentric, chiastic pattern, with sections in each half mirroring each other throughout, while the central sections provide a pivotal peak and interpretive key that radiate meaning back out to the margins. To quote Mary Douglas, “the meaning is in the middle.” The middle is also the place of Peircean Thirdness. In this paper I map the chapter’s text-level chiastic structures and trace its intimations of Peircean semiotic pragmatism. The core rings of the text endorse contrite fallibilism while also prefiguring triadic structure, the pragmatic maxim, and the continuity thesis. Referencing cultural and historical contexts plus recent scholarship on Zhuangzi and Peirce, I ultimately argue that this ancient text, like the pragmatist semiotic it foreshadows, can be better appreciated and applied by embracing the interplay of centers and margins, discarding debilitating ideologies, and waking up to new degrees of freedom.

Hegel, Peirce and us

Historically, our theme is situated within the triangle of three of Kant's students: Hegel (1770-1831), Bolzano (1781-1848) and Peirce (1839-1914). All three wanted to change Kant's strict separation of philosophy and science by developing a new conception of logic. Bolzano inaugurated the so-called linguistic turn of philosophy which became the guiding principle of all analytical philosophy (Dummett, 2014) and he opposed Hegel’s unity of concept and object of knowledge. Charles Peirce took a middle position, a position that is expressed in his so-called Pragmatic Maxim (Peirce, CP 5.3). Taken together we might say that a universal principle of complementarity of meaning and reference, or of meaning and information (in the sense of Shannon) finds its origin in Post-Kantian philosophy. We encounter here the very same approach of principled thinking endorsed by Einstein in physics (special theory of relativity) or by the formal axiomatic approach in mathematics (Hilbert)! Key Words: Bolzano, Hegel, Peirce; Complementarity of sense and reference; Geometry from Euclid to Einstein; Hilbert.

James and Wittgenstein

According to a common reading in the Wittgensteinian literature, William James’s writings, especially the psychological ones, were for the Viennese philosopher a paradigmatic example of conceptual confusion. This chapter argues against this reading, although without minimizing the criticism that Ludwig Wittgenstein leveled against James. More specifically, rather than ascertaining whether Wittgenstein was right or wrong about James, the aim is to figure out what picture of James Wittgenstein offers, and if and in what terms anything specifically Jamesian remains in Wittgenstein’s work. Since it was through the Varieties of Religious Experience that Wittgenstein first came into contact with James, religion is the starting point for this reflection. I will then focus on the pragmatic maxim and Wittgenstein’s comments about the pragmatist conception of truth. The three central sections of this chapter deal with psychology. I will then broaden the discussion to the theme of aspect-seeing, and finally, in the last section, examine Wittgenstein’s observations about the “good” in pragmatism in order to draw some concluding remarks.

James and Pragmatism: The Road Not Taken

William James envisaged pragmatism as a reform of philosophy. Like his fellow pragmatist John Dewey, he held that the history of philosophy often shows how questions, once relevant and exciting, inspire a sequence of derivative and ever-narrower inquiries, in which the original point becomes lost. To read James’s pragmatism in this way distinguishes it from the reforming efforts of the logical positivists, whose concerns with “cognitive significance” and “meaningful language” neither he nor Dewey shared. Viewed in this light, James’s version of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, his theory of truth, and his interest in reconciling the claims of science and religion take on new significance. His discussions point toward a road less traveled, one that twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy did not take.