Richard Kenneth Atkins

The two concluding chapters of Josiah Royce's The Problem of Christianity pose significant interpretive challenges. The final chapter, "Summary and Conclusion," sets forward Charles S. Peirce's theory of scientific inquiry. Although Royce had earlier explained Peirce's theory of signs and interpretation, he had not examined Peirce's theory of scientific inquiry in detail, making its appearance in the summary and conclusion of the book peculiar. Moreover, it is not wholly evident how a theory of scientific inquiry is supposed to address the problem with which the second part of the book sets out, viz., how Christianity can possess a "more than human meaning and foundation" given that such...

On March 12, 2018, I received an email from André De Tienne, General Editor of the Peirce Edition Project. He recommended that I visit the Francis Blake archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society, remarking, Francis Blake was a cousin of Charles Peirce. I have not yet figured out how that cousinage works out genealogically. In any case, on 13 January 1893, the day CSP and Juliette returned from Boston to New York after the Lowell Lectures, they first took a trip to Weston, MA, to visit Frank Blake, and from there they went to Worcester to visit W. Stanley Hall at Clark University. … If you look in folder R L49, it...

Peirce’s Speculative Grammar is a masterful chronological reconstruction of Peirce’s work on logic as semiotics, or the study of signs and the purposes to which we put them. Peirce’s writings on these topics span more than fifty years. Moreover, his manuscripts number well over 100,000 pages, many of which have yet to be published. Patently, gaining a comprehensive overview of Peirce’s writings on logic is no small feat, and Bellucci is to be celebrated for his efforts. Peirce wanted to be known foremost as a logician. He did not, however, want to be known primarily as a formal logician. In a drafted lecture from 1905, he tells...

The System of Existential Graphs may be characterized with great truth as presenting before our eyes a moving picture of thought. Provided this characterization be taken not as a flatly literal statement, but as a simile, it will, I venture to predict, surprise you to find what a strain of detailed comparison it will bear without snapping.Peirce once called his graphical system of logic—the Existential Graphs or EGs—the moving pictures of thought. In this essay, I argue that Peirce meant that using his graphs to study the movement of thought is akin to Eadweard Muybridge’s use of moving pictures to study animal motion, and I show that this analogy is highly apt for several reasons. The analogy is apt because:...

Curiously, Charles Sanders Peirce and Maurice Merleau-Ponty raise the same objection to British empiricism: its foundational tenet is nominalist. In his 1869 review of a new edition of James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Peirce traces the foundational tenet of Mill's work back to Hume's Copy Principle—that all of our ideas are fainter copies of our impressions—and then remarks, If I compare a red book and a red cushion, there is, according to them [the "English psychologists," among whom Peirce includes Mill, Hume, and Berkeley], no general sensation red which enters into both these images, nor is there any idea of a general respect...

: In 1878's ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, Peirce states that truth is the predestinate opinion, or that which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate. Later in his life, though, he would claim both that truth is what would be believed if we could figure out the right method of inquiry and that, instead of affirming that truth is the predestinate opinion in 1878, he ought to have affirmed that truth is what would be believed if inquiry were carried sufficiently far. The aim of this paper is to provide an account of why the early Peirce endorses the claim that truth is the predestinate opinion and why the late Peirce is compelled to modify that position. I argue that Peirce's early statement that truth is the predestinate opinion is motivated by his theory that all mental action is of the nature of a valid inference and that the later modification of his view is partly motivated by his rejection of that theory.

Charles Sanders Peirce is regarded as the founding father of pragmatism and a key figure in the development of American philosophy, yet his practical philosophy remains under-acknowledged and misinterpreted. In this book, Richard Atkins argues that Peirce did in fact have developed and systematic views on ethics, on religion, and on how to live, and that these views are both plausible and relevant. Drawing on a controversial lecture that Peirce delivered in 1898 and related works, he examines Peirce's theories of sentiment and instinct, his defence of the rational acceptability of religious belief, his analysis of self-controlled action, and his pragmatic account of practical ethics, showing how he developed his views and how they interact with those of his great contemporary William James. This study will be essential for scholars of Peirce and for those interested in American philosophy, pragmatism, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of action, and ethics.

Rarely these days are philosophy books both bold and sweeping, but Maddalena’s The Philosophy of Gesture is both. Whether you think that is good will surely depend on your philosophical temperament. Personally, I consider it bad taste to criticize a philosopher for striking out on a new path. Philosophy, as any student of Peirce’s works will affirm, is an experimental science. Some of those experiments might well lead you to the hinterlands, but at least you will have a more detailed map. As with reading any book, the question to ask is not: What is wrong with it? But: What can I learn from it? Reading Maddalena’s book, I had the distinct sense of reading something like James’s Pragmatism. Much is...

Nagel’s challenge is to devise an objective phenomenological vocabulary that can describe the objective structural similarities between aural and visual perception. My contention is that Charles Sanders Peirce’s little studied and less understood phenomenological vocabulary makes a significant contribution to meeting this challenge. I employ Peirce’s phenomenology to identify the structural isomorphism between seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet’s blare. I begin by distinguishing between the vividness of an experience and the intensity of a quality. I proceed to identify further points of structural isomorphism (a) between the experience of seeing a scarlet red and of hearing a trumpet blare and (b) between the qualities of those experiences. Lastly, I gesture towards how these distinctions can be an aid in describing what it is like to be a bat.

In the first part of this essay (The Pluralist 7.2, Summer 2012, pp. 1-29), I argued against the Narrow Conception of phaneroscopy by showing that it is not to be found in Peirce's writings and that several passages in Peirce's writings indicate the Narrow Conception is false. As a consequence, we must broaden our understanding of phaneroscopy's aim. In this part, I shall argue that we should broaden our understanding of phaneroscopy's method, that is, our understanding of phaneroscopic observation, description, and analysis.However, before proceeding, I should reply to one claim that has cropped up every now and then. Some interpreters of Peirce have commented in correspondence with me that Peirce's phaneroscopy..

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce’s theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science.

This essay shows that Peirce's (more or less) final classification of the sciences arises from the systematic application of his Categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness to the classification of the sciences themselves and that he does not do so until his 1903's "An Outline Classification of the Sciences." The essay proceeds by: First, making some preliminary comments regarding Peirce's notion of an architectonic, or classification of the sciences; Second, briefly explaining Peirce's Categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness; Third, examining how Peirce classifies the sciences in 1902 and 1903—and specifically how the 1903 classification utilizes the Categories; Fourth and finally, showing that he is only led to classify the sciences in this fashion as result of his philosophical inquiries during those intervening months—especially as a result of his Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism.

ABSTRACT: Cheryl Misak has offered a pragmatic argument against a position she calls Scientific transcendentalists hold that truth is something different from what would be believed at the end of inquiry; more specifically, they adhere to a correspondence theory of truth. Misak thinks scientific transcendentalists thereby undermine the connection between truth and inquiry, for (a) pragmatically speaking, it adds nothing to truth and inquiry to ask whether what would be the results of sufficiently rigorous inquiry are really true and (b) they can only accept it as an article of faith that inquiry leads us to truth. I defend against Misak’s objections.

_Puzzled?!_ seamlessly fuses two traditional approaches to the study of philosophy at the introductory level. It is thematic, examining fundamental issues in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and more. It is also historical, introducing major philosophical arguments that have arisen throughout the history of Western philosophy. But its real innovation lies elsewhere. Each of its twelve chapters begins with a traditional argument of a thoroughly puzzling kind: a valid philosophical argument with highly plausible premises but a surprising conclusion. The remainder of the chapter shows how major innovations in the history of philosophy arise as logical responses to that argument. Written with a light touch, _Puzzled?!_ nevertheless offers a rigorous introduction to the ideas it explores and to the foundations of critical thinking itself. It will serve as effectively as a main or supplementary text in an introduction to critical thinking as it will in Philosophy 101.