Abstract
The first generation of Peirce scholars generally considered his cosmological writings something of an irrelevant embarrassment. Recent commentators have realized that Peirce the tough-minded logician and philosopher of science must somehow be reconciled with Peirce the tender-minded defender of a metaphysics of evolutionary love. This paper will explain how one of the earliest proponents of a broadly verificationist approach to meaning could also defend a conception of the universe as growing toward concrete reasonableness through being loved. Verificationism and cosmology come intriguingly together in Peirce’s denial that unknowable realities can exist and his concomitant insistence that reality is thought-like. Special attention will be paid to this anti-nominalist theory of reality and to one of its consequences, viz. that a person is of the nature of a sign. Peirce’s argument that God is real and personal thus deploys distinctive, valuable and challenging conceptions of reality and personality.
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Notes
- 1.
I reference Peirce in the standard way, viz. by page number of The Essential Peirce (1992, 1998), by paragraph number of the Collected Papers (1935, 1938), and by manuscript number for unpublished manuscripts.
- 2.
See the articles by Fisch and Boler for starters.
- 3.
See CP 1.26 (1903). I should note here that Peirce countenances an additional mode of being, viz. that of pure qualitative possibility. This category of being figures importantly in Peirce’s religious metaphysics, but I mostly avoid it here, simply because two modes of being are quite enough to keep us occupied.
- 4.
See MS L224 (1905), cited by Orange (1984), p. 72.
- 5.
See especially pp. 50–51.
- 6.
MS L224, op. cit.
- 7.
- 8.
MS 313, cited by Orange (1984, p. 62).
- 9.
See Orange (1984, p. 62).
- 10.
I am grateful to Jeanine Diller and Katie McShane for helpful discussion of these matters.
References
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Kasser, J.L. (2013). Peirce on God, Reality and Personality. In: Diller, J., Kasher, A. (eds) Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5219-1_36
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