Leibniz and Peirce

On several occasions during his life, Peirce argued that Aristotle was the first to present  perfect form of induction, and also claimed that he followed Aristotle in this formulation. Despite this, Peirce criticizes Aristotle´s justifi cation of induction as an enumeration of all individuals and as a self-evident and immediate inference that depends upon intuition (nous). In this article, the author explores the readings and comments that Peirce makes of the two most important passages of Aristotle on induction (epagōgē), namely, Prior Analytics II, 23 and Posterior Analytics II, 19. The first is commented and partially translated by Peirce whereas the second is not mentioned directly, although it seems that Peirce refers to it when he discusses the problem of fi rst principles. In addition to presenting Peirce’s  comments about these two passages, the author evaluates critically their accuracy and finds that Peirce sometimes interprets them wrongly.

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

This article builds on C. S. Peirce’s suggestive blueprint for an inclusive outlook that grants reality to his three categories. Moving away from the usual focus on (contentious) cosmological forces, I use a modal principle to partition various ontological layers: regular sign-action (like coded language) subsumes actual sign-action (like here-and-now events) which in turn subsumes possible sign-action (like qualities related to whatever would be similar to them). Once we realize that the triadic sign’s components are each answerable to this asymmetric subsumption, we obtain the means to track at which level of complexity semiosis finds itself, in a given case. Since the bulk of such a “trinitarian” metaphysics would be devoted to countenancing un-interpreted phenomena, I argue that current misgivings about sign-based ontologies are largely misplaced.

In response to the claim that our sense of will is illusory, some philosophers have called for a better understanding of the phenomenology of agency. Although I am broadly sympathetic with the tenor of this response, I question whether the positive-theoretic blueprint it promotes truly heralds a tenable undertaking. Marshaling a Schopenhauerian insight, I examine the possibility that agency might not be amenable to phenomenological description. Framing this thesis in terms of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic framework, I suggest a way to integrate the idea of streaming experiences with that of bodily strivings, which, owing to their primitive structure, can never be represented.

C. S. Peirce is often credited as a forerunner of the verificationist theory of meaning. In his early pragmatist papers, Peirce did say that if we want to make our ideas clear(er), then we should look downstream to their actual and future effects. For many who work in philosophy of mind, this is enough to endorse functionalism and dismiss the whole topic of qualia. It complexifies matters, however, to consider that the term qualia was introduced by the founder of pragmatism himself. Peirce was adamant that only triadic relations can support language and cognition. Even so, he insisted on purely logical grounds that, when we analyze triadic signs all the way, we are left with a qualitative residue he called Firstness. Such an isolated relatum could never be studied experimentally. Yet, given that this primitive state can be confirmed by means of a formal or prescissive distinction, I believe the Peircean account can do justice to many of the intuitions that generate the so-called hard problem of consciousness. My goal, then, is to show that Peirce's semiotic commitment to qualia is compatible with his foundational statements about pragmatism.

En varias oportunidades durante su vida, Peirce sostuvo que Aristóteles es el primero en presentar una forma perfecta de inducción y también afi rmó que seguía a Aristóteles en esta formulación. A pesar de esto, Peirce critica la justifi cación de la inducción que da Aristóteles como una enumeración de todos los individuos y como una inferencia autoevidente e inmediata que depende de la intuición (nous). En este artículo, el autor explora la lectura y los comentarios que Peirce realiza de los dos pasajes más importantes de Aristóteles sobre la inducción (epagōgē), a saber, los Analíticos Primeros II, 23 y los Analíticos Posteriores II, 19. El primero es comentado y parcialmente traducido por Peirce; en cambio, el segundo no es mencionado directamente pero parece que se refi ere a él cuando discute el mismo problema de los primeros principios. Además de presentar los comentarios de Peirce acerca de estos dos pasajes, el autor evalúa críticamente la exactitud de estos y encuentra que ...

Commentators have already praised this worthy text in a way that reveals what a tremendous work of both scholarship and authorial insight this biography is. Joseph Brent apparently scoured every mention of Peirce in all texts — every letter written, every second-hand mention, missing nothing, to provide this in-depth portrait of one the great aberrant geniuses of world (not just American) philosophy, a notable achievement! Peirce was obsessive in pursuing and adapting his philosophy of "logic" (which we might better recognize as epistemology), and eventually, his incomparable genius made itself evident (but not during his lifetime). His mind travelled to the outer reaches of abstraction, to the point that William James admitted he could not follow him. One of the very few who seems to have understood him in his lifetime was the theological philosopher Josiah Royce.

One puzzle of modern physics is how, according to Bohm's double-aspect cosmology, the spacetime or explicate order can be deterministic while at the same time the quantum or implicate order is presumably (because quantum) probabilistic. Here we suggest that the solution to this apparent paradox is that the quantum or implicate order is, as the monadic or mental is in Leibniz, ordered not in time (because instantaneous) but in sequence, like a movie. Quantum events are then characterized not by "when" but solely probabilistically by "where (this quantum monad goes instantaneously)". Previously we have refered to this as a "movie in the mind", but now it becomes evident that mind need not be involved, it's just quantum physics.-Ever since the gratuitously skeptical Hume, science has imprisoned us in the dark cave of materialism and blind empiricism and needs to restore us to the rational, deductive sunlight of plato (plotinus) in which the universe must be mentally governed, and governed from a singularity top down.-see my website https://independent.academia.edu/RogerClough or search in Google with a search term such as Clough plotinus Site: https://independent.academia.edu/ RogerClough This paper can be referenced by opening it in academia.edu and copying the address in the address bar.