“Vaguely Like a Man”: The Theism of Charles S. Peirce

This chapter analyzes how Charles Sanders Peirce's theism is “sound pragmatism,” and this is not likely to attract positivists who have adopted its maxim as an expression of their own views concerning verification. His theism, he says, is a consequence of anthropomorphism—a claim not likely to enthuse either traditional theists or hard-headed scientists. Moreover, Peirce's theism is intrinsically infected with vagueness, a disease which surely will be diagnosed as fatal by many analysts and logicians. The chapter also shows how Peirce's theism is supported by a form of the ontological argument, and aims to understand the precise import of these shocking claims and perhaps suggest at least that they are not so bad even if unusual and/or distasteful.

Peirce on Continuity

This chapter deals with “continuity” as a key mathematical notion and a central philosophical category to which Peirce gives much attention. From 1880 to 1911, his attempts to give continuity a precise mathematical expression show a clear development marked by several significant changes. Four main periods may be identified: pre-Cantorian: until 1884; Cantorian: 1884–1894; Kantistic: 1895–1908; and post-Cantorian: 1908–1911. According to Peirce, the accepted mathematical definition of continuity describes an “imperfect continuum,” but the “true continuum” is something other than any metrical or even ordinal relation of elements. The true continuum has no actual element.

Peirce on “Substance” and “Foundations”

This chapter examines Charles Sanders Peirce's take on two puzzling notions: the substantiality of things (including the “self”), and the foundations of human knowledge. In that sense, it also analyzes the three ideas central to Peirce's theory of knowing as continuous inference: the notion of truth, the notion of reality, and the notion of community. First, Peirce adds to the traditional notion of truth a heuristic notion of truth as that upon which the community of inquirers will agree in the long run. In addition, Peirce's account of reality explicitly endorses the scholastic insight into truth and reality as co-extensive. Finally, Peirce's account of truth and of reality requires the explicit recognition of the role of the community. This refers not just to any group of people but to the community of inquirers.

Normative Science and the Pragmatic Maxim

This chapter explores how Charles Sanders Peirce was convinced that his account of the hierarchical dependence of logic on ethics, and of ethics on esthetics, was a discovery of fundamental importance for a correct understanding of his thought, and one that distinguished his “pragmaticism” from other, more familiar, interpretations of his own famous maxim. It would be a mistake to think that because this was a late development in Peirce's thought, it was an afterthought. It would also be a mistake to think that because Peirce's exposition of that role was short and unsatisfactory, it was not an integral part of what he conceived to be his “architectonic” system.

Peirce on Normative Science

This chapter investigates Charles Sanders Peirce's interest in the normative sciences. Although logic received most of Peirce's attention throughout his long career, he was always interested in ethical systems. Until the 1880s, however, he considered ethics to be nothing more than an art or a practical science which relied little upon theoretical principles. It should be remembered that the first formulation of the pragmatic maxim and his analysis of belief in terms of what one is willing to act upon appeared in the 1870s. Pierce says that he began to see the importance of ethical theory around 1882. As a result of this illumination he undertook a serious study of the great moralists and began to suspect that there was some important connection between ethics and logic.

Charles Sanders Peirce: An Overview

This chapter provides an overview of the life of Charles Sander Peirce—philosopher, logician, scientist, and father of American pragmatism. This man, unappreciated in his lifetime, virtually ignored by the academic world of his day, is now recognized as perhaps America's most original philosopher and her greatest logician. Indeed, on the latter score, he is surely one of the logical giants of the nineteenth century, which produced such geniuses as Georg Cantor, Gottlob Frege, George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead. Today, more than eighty years after his death, another generation of scholars is beginning to pay him the attention he deserves. The chapter shows the brilliant and tragic career of Peirce. Though he never published a book on philosophy, his articles and drafts fill volumes.

Objective Chance: Lonergan and Peirce on Scientific Generalization

This chapter delves into the important issues of substantial unity and the foundations of knowledge. It argues that the views of Bernard Lonergan and Charles Sanders Peirce concerning world process are strikingly similar. Both outline an evolutionary cosmology that pays attention to both the law-like and the chance elements required to think of the universe as developing. Both reject the notion that the universe is mechanistically determined even if it is ordered. Both look upon “chance” as an objective component of the universe, not merely as a cloak for ignorance. The remarkable convergence of ideas of two thinkers separated by almost a century not only illuminates their place in intellectual history but, more importantly, adds an extrinsic confirmation of a cosmological view that takes motion and change seriously.

C. S. Peirce’s Argument for God’s Reality: A Pragmatist’s View

This chapter explains that religion for Charles Sanders Peirce is a topic of “vital importance” and so is a matter more of the heart than of the head. He writes that all sensible talk about religion, morals, and aesthetics must be common-place, all reasoning about them unsound, and all study of them narrow and sordid. When it is a question of great decisions affecting one's lives, it is the wise man who knows that sentiment and instinct are sure guides, while reasoning about such matters is out of place since that faculty is a notoriously fallible instrument. In addition, the chapter presents Peirce's argument for God's reality: the Humble Argument, sometimes called the Neglected Argument.

Action Through Thought: The Ethics of Inquiry

This chapter talks about how Charles Sanders Peirce's philosophy might be judged by some to be “un-American” because it does not live up to the stereotype of “American.” According to this popular view, Americans are the great technicians; they have the know-how; they are successful in the practical world of business, commerce, and industry. But as speculative thinkers, as men of cosmic vision, Americans are a sorry lot—not a Kant nor a Hegel among them. The chapter shows how Peirce's pragmaticism is as sophisticated and serious as any philosophical movement abroad, indeed more so than some, and that the “American Mind” is speculative, complex, and rich.

C. S. Peirce and Religious Experience

This chapter discusses how Peirce viewed the role of experience in religion. Over the years, there have been two problems present in the analysis of religion and religious experience. The first is classical empiricism's charge that religious language is meaningless, in the sense of bearing no cognitive content. The second is the tension felt by religious believers between the need for an authentic experience of God—a sense of awareness of God's nearness or presence—and the need for rational argument to ground and to legitimate any such experience. Experience is required to make religion concrete and alive; argument is required to authenticate the experience. The chapter turns to Peirce to answer both these problems in terms of his general theory of experience and cognition.