Kósmos Noetós: The Metaphysical Architecture of Charles S. Peirce

130 Pages·2017·1.514 MB·English

by  Ivo Assad Ibri (auth.)

Philosophical Studies Series
Ivo Assad Ibri
Kósmos
Noetós
The Metaphysical Architecture of
Charles S. Peirce
Philosophical Studies Series
Volume 131
Editor-in-Chief
Luciano Floridi, University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, United Kingdom
Mariarosaria Taddeo, University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, United Kingdom
Executive Editorial Board
Patrick Allo, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Massimo Durante, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
Phyllis Illari, University College London, United Kingdom
Shannon Vallor, Santa Clara University
Board of Consulting Editors
Lynne Rudder Baker, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Stewart Cohen, Arizona State University, Tempe
Radu Bogdan, Tulane University
Marian David, University of Notre Dame
John M. Fischer, University of California at Riverside
Keith Lehrer, University of Arizona, Tucson
Denise Meyerson, Macquarie University
François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod, EHESS, Paris
Mark Sainsbury, University of Texas at Austin
Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo
Nicholas D. Smith, Lewis & Clark College
Linda Zagzebski, University of Oklahoma
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/6459
Ivo Assad Ibri
Kósmos Noetós
The Metaphysical Architecture
of Charles S. Peirce
Ivo Assad Ibri
Philosophy Department
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
São Paulo, Brazil
Translation from the Portuguese language edition: “Kósmos noetós: a arquitetura metafísica de
Charles S. Peirce” by Ivo Assad Ibri © Paulus Editora, 2015. All rights reserved. Translated by
Henry Mallett.
ISSN 0921-8599 ISSN 2542-8349 (electronic)
Philosophical Studies Series
ISBN 978-3-319-66313-5 ISBN 978-3-319-66314-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-66314-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950287
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors
or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims
in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my children Gabriel (who knew so much
about me), Clara and Conrado.
Foreword
In 1879, a review of the state of philosophy in the United States appeared in Mind,
the first and then only British journal of philosophy1. The author of that review,
G. Stanley Hall, explained that even though Americans seemed prone to indepen-
dent thinking, the dogmatism and practical spirit “characteristic of American life”
were obstacles to free philosophical inquiry. What philosophy there was in the
United States was mainly imported from Europe and was typically shaped to con-
form with, even to promote, theological aims and presuppositions. So far, Americans
had not satisfied Emerson’s call “to extend America’s independence from Europe
beyond the political realm to the sphere of thought and culture.”2 But Hall was glad
to be able to report a promising development for the future of philosophy in America.
Religious dogmatism, an unrelenting stumbling-block to the advancement of phi-
losophy, seemed to be losing out in critical venues to the spirit of science and a new
platform for philosophy was emerging.
Hall, a former student of William James at Harvard and the first person in
America to earn a Ph.D. in psychology, was an enthusiastic promoter of a scientific
approach to philosophy. A new philosophical movement led by lawyers and scien-
tific men was underway in the United States and Hall was among the first to recog-
nize that Charles S. Peirce was the intellectual leader of this new movement, born in
the deliberations of the famous Cambridge Metaphysical Club. The story of this
remarkable club is the story of a paradigm shift in American thought. When Peirce
and his friend, William James, founded the club in 1871, the devastating Civil War
and the assassination of President Lincoln were still painfully concrete and the
Darwinian controversy was raging. As Louis Menand explained in his Pulitzer Prize
winning book, The Metaphysical Club,3 the social and cultural upheaval of these
1 G. Stanley Hall. “Philosophy in the United States.” In: Mind, vol. 4 (1879): 89–105.
2 Emerson’s oration, “The American Scholar,” was delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in
Cambridge on 31 August 1837. It is included in many Emerson anthologies including Ralph Waldo
Emerson; Essays & Lectures, The Library of America, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Viking Press,
1983), pp. 53–71.
3 Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
vii
viii Foreword
mid-nineteenth century years undermined confidence in absolutes and ideas of
permanence and shifted philosophical reflection from a yearning for foundations
and origins to an emphasis on growth and consequences. Traditional values had
failed in the face of the brute finality of capricious experience. The advancement of
knowledge seemed destined to depend more on new experimental methods in sci-
ence than on reasoning from first principles.
In his review, Hall proclaimed to the readers of Mind that “about a year ago Mr.
C S. Peirce” began publishing a series of papers that set out a comprehensive pro-
gram which “promises to be one of the most important of American contributions to
philosophy.” Hall was drawing attention to the series Peirce was publishing in
Popular Science Monthly under the general title, “Illustrations of the Logic of
Science,” the first two papers being the famous “The Fixation of Belief” and “How
to Make Our Ideas Clear” which, together, Hillary Putnam described as “the mani-
festo of pragmatism.”4 These were the papers drawn up from Peirce’s communica-
tions to the Metaphysical Club and they carried forward an anti-Cartesian
reconstruction of philosophy that Peirce had begun a decade earlier.5 Hall recog-
nized in Peirce’s revolutionary thought the basis for a new scientific philosophy
freed from a priori metaphysical presuppositions that impede the advancement of
knowledge.
Hall devoted a surprisingly large portion of his review to a summary of Peirce’s
“analysis of the advancement of knowledge through a circular, or rather an onward-
spiraling process that begins with the ‘irritation of doubt,’ proceeds to the establish-
ment of ‘belief,’ and culminates in ‘action’ and the consequent establishment of a
more or less trustworthy ‘habit,’ before returning, in time, to further doubt, belief,
action, and modification of habit.”6 Hall summarized Peirce’s pragmatic account of
meaning by explaining that “beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of
action to which they give rise” and that “there is no distinction of meaning so fine
as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.”7 He went on to point
out some of the key tenets of Peirce’s new program noting in particular that syn-
thetic inference involves both inductive and hypothetical (what Peirce would later
4 Peirce introduced his pragmatism in a series of six papers published in 1877 and 1878 in the
Popular Science Monthly. These six papers, as a group, were planned as a book to be titled
“Illustrations of the Logic of Science” and have been reprinted in the main editions of Peirce’s
writings (e.g.: W, 3.242–338; EP, 1.109–199). For Putnam remark see Giovanna Borradori, The
American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty,
Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1994), p. 62.
5 According to Richard Bernstein in The Pragmatic Turn (Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2010), prag-
matism was born in 1868 in the pages of Peirce’s Journal of Speculative Philosophy series, in
which Peirce argued that all thought is in signs and where he made a strong case against intuitive
cognition (W, 2.193–272; also in EP, 1.11–82).
6 David E. Leary, “Between Peirce (1878) and James (1898): G. Stanley Hall, the Origins of
Pragmatism, and the History of Psychology.” In: Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,
vol. 45.1 (2009): 5–20. Leary gives a good account of Hall’s review and of Hall’s conversion to
pragmatism almost 20 years before William James gave his famous address in Berkeley promoting
pragmatism.
7 Hall, 1879, p. 102.
Foreword ix
call “abductive”) reasoning and that “As all knowledge comes from synthetic
inference which can by no means be reduced to deduction, it is inferred that all
human certainty consists merely in our knowing that the processes by which our
knowledge has been derived are such as must generally lead to true conclusions.”8
Finally, Hall noted Peirce’s seminal claim that “Interest in an indefinite community,
recognition of the possibility of this interest being made supreme, and hope in the
unlimited continuance of intellectual activity are the indispensable requirements of
Logic.”9
Hall’s bold prediction that Peirce was producing one of the most important
American contributions to philosophy proved to be unerring. Peirce’s comprehen-
sive pragmatic philosophy, scientifically informed and grounded in semiotic real-
ism, has without question become America’s great contribution to philosophy—as
more and more scholars from around the world turn to Peirce for philosophical
illumination he has emerged as a central figure of America’s intellectual heritage.
When reflecting on the state of philosophy in the mid-1930s, the great mathematical
logician who coauthored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, and one of
the greatest metaphysicians of the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead,
maintained that European philosophy had “gone dry” and that the center of living
philosophy had shifted to America: “My belief is that the effective founders of the
renaissance in American philosophy are Charles Peirce and William James.”10
But how American, really, was this new philosophy coming out of New England?
Max H. Fisch has argued that the movement beginning in the Metaphysical Club
and continuing until the Second World War was truly a classic period in American
thought and that the resulting philosophy does embody and promote the essential
characteristics of its national culture.11 It has become routine to regard Peirce as the
progenitor of this classic period and to designate Peirce’s philosophy, along with
that of James and other classic philosophers, under the rubric “American philoso-
phy.” Classic American philosophy is typically equated with pragmatism and is sup-
posed to name a unique approach to philosophical problems. Of course it is true, as
Ralph Barton Perry pointed out, that a nation’s history, ethnic origin, and natural
environment are likely to be “reflected in the type of philosophy that [tends to] pre-
dominate and to prevail” in that country,12 and it is true that pragmatism as com-
monly conceived reflects some typical characteristics of the American character,
some of them less than laudatory. But as the Brazilian philosopher, João Cruz Costa,
so astutely wondered, can there really be “such a thing as an American philosophy
8 Hall, 1879, p. 103.
9 Ibid.
10 From a letter of 2 January 1936 to Charles Hartshorne. In: Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead:
The Man and His Work – Volume II: 1910–1947, ed. J. B. Schneewind (The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), p. 345.
11 Max H. Fisch. Classic American Philosophers (Appleton-Century Crofts, 1951. Reissued by
Fordham University Press in 1996).
12 Ralph B. Perry. “Is There a North-American Philosophy?” In: Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, vol. 9.3 (1949): 356–369.
x Foreword
any more than there can be an American arithmetic or physics.”13 However much a
great philosophy may reflect the national origins and cultural nurture of its author
and proponents, isn’t it in the deeper revelations of more universal structures and
truths that its lasting greatness resides? Yes, Peirce was an American philosopher
but his philosophy transcends nationality.
Peirce’s work was internationally recognized to be important from the start,
especially his work in science and logic, and also his writings on pragmatism, but
during the mid-twentieth century period of dominance of analytic philosophy the
classic American philosophers fell out of fashion. Nevertheless, the signal impor-
tance of Peirce’s philosophy was never doubted and his influence is on the increase.
Peirce’s current stature as an international philosopher was born out in 2014 at a
world congress that met in Lowell, Massachusetts, a century after his death, to com-
memorate his intellectual legacy. Over 250 scholars from over 25 countries partici-
pated in those meetings which were sponsored by organizations from around the
world, including the Center for Pragmatism Studies at the Pontifical Catholic
University of São Paulo (PUCSP), founded in 1998 by the author of the book at
hand. Around mid-twentieth century, Peirce began to enter the intellectual life of
Brazil, principally in studies concerning semiotics and communication. Thanks ini-
tially to Decio Pignatari, but more significantly to the sustained research and teach-
ing career of Lucia Santaella, São Paulo Catholic University became an international
center for the study of Peirce’s theory of signs and the fountainhead for the spread
of interest in Peirce’s semiotics throughout Brazil.14 All the while, Ivo Ibri, the
author of the present work, sought to understand the ontological ground of Peirce’s
thought, convinced that his more foundational approach could bring a broader
understanding to both semiotics and pragmatism. This line of research made Brazil
a hub for studies in Peirce’s comprehensive philosophy.
Ibri’s international reputation as a Peirce scholar is amplified by three extraordi-
nary institutional achievements. In 1998, as mentioned above, he founded the Center
for Pragmatism Studies (Centro de Estudos de Pragmatismo) which promotes
research in classical and contemporary pragmatism, especially in connection with
logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Although Peirce is not the exclusive focus of the center,
he is a principal focus. In connection with the center’s mission, Ibri initiated annual
Meetings on Pragmatism, which in 2000 became International Meetings on
Pragmatism. These meetings bring international scholars to Brazil to meet and dia-
logue with Brazilian professors and students about pragmatism and especially about
Peirce. According to Santaella, “With these meetings on Pragmatism, Ivo Ibri cer-
tainly put the Catholic University of São Paulo in the world map of Peirce studies.”15
Magnifying the impact of the International Meetings on Pragmatism and the
13 From Edgar H. Henderson’s review of Costa’s A History of Ideas in Brazil: The Development
of Philosophy in Brazil and the Evolution of National History. In: Journal of the History of
Philosophy, Vol. 4.4 (1966): 342–344.
14 Lucia Santaella. “Peirce’s Reception in Brazil.” In: European Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy, vol. 6.1 (2014): 34–38.
15 Santaella, 2014, p. 4.