Under the general tutelage of Kant, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) introduced American pragmatism to yet another philosophical dialectic: between a neglected transcendental instinct and earthly authorities. The dialectic became Peirce’s response to various evolutionary schemes in the 19th century. Guided by the recollected voices of Socrates, Jesus, St. John, Anselm, and Kant, as well as his own brand of pragmatism, Peirce eventually developed a “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” a century ago, in 1908. Here, Peirce endorsed a more (...) adventurous god than ecclesiastical or theological authorities could imagine, a god of love (agapism) and chance (tychism), but still rife with fallibility. (shrink)

In his recent book Reinventing the Sacred, renowned biologist and systems theorist Stuart Kauffman offers an avenue for the revival of the sacred and for reconciling sacredness with a robust scientific outlook. According to Kauffman, God is a human cultural invention, and he urges us to reinvent the sacred as the ceaseless creativity in nature. I argue that Kauffman's proposal suffers from a major shortcoming, namely, being at odds with the nature, and content, of authentic experiences of the sacred, experiences (...) which point invariably in the direction of a reality which transcends human imagination and capacity for cultural innovation. Correspondingly, I point in the direction of an alternative approach to the revival of the sacred rooted in what I call the path of direct spiritual awareness. I argue that, while being in better accord with the phenomenology of religious experience, this realist alternative to Kauffman's constructivism also avoids the unpleasant symptoms which often accompany traditional theism, namely, dogmatism, irrationalism, and incompatibility with a scientifically minded metaphysics. (shrink)

This essay aims to shed new light on the relations between physiology and psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on the use of unicellular organisms as research objects during that period. Within the frameworks of evolutionism and monism advocated by Ernst Haeckel, protozoa were perceived as objects situated at the borders between organism and cell and individual and society. Scholars such as Max Verworn, Alfred Binet, and Herbert Spencer Jennings were provoked by these organisms to (...) undertake experimental investigations situated between general physiology and psychology that differed from the physiological psychology advocated by Wilhelm Wundt. Some of these investigations sought to locate psychological properties in the molecular structure of protoplasm; others stressed the existence of organic and psychological individuality in protozoa. In the following decades, leading philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Henri Bergson, as well as psychological researchers like Sigmund Freud, integrated the results of these investigations into their reflections on such problems as the nature of the will, the structure of the ego, and the holistic nature of the reactions of organisms to their environment. (shrink)

In a recent conference volume, American philosopher Michael Sandel engages the Confucian tradition in the search for alternatives to what Sandel calls the “unencumbered self,” the unattached liberal subject as detailed in the philosophy of John Rawls. Responding to Sandel, American Confucianist Roger Ames draws on a lifetime of comparative thought to advance the Pragmatism of John Dewey as a way to interrogate Western philosophy in general, arguing that “humane becomings,” a view of the human person facilitated, Ames writes, by (...) Deweyan Pragmatism, are the Confucian ideal and the key to recovering a holistic anthropology within the Western tradition. In this essay, I intervene in the Ames-Sandel debate to argue that Charles Peirce, and not John Dewey, is the best American Pragmatist for bridging the divide between the Confucian and Rawlsian views of the human person. Peirce’s emphasis on love as true intersubjectivity and on communication as the exchange of real meaning is, I argue, the key to unlocking the Confucian ideal to the West. (shrink)

Anti-capitalist thinkers in the West have long argued that the expansion of markets creates new wants faster than it can satisfy them, and that consumption under capitalism is a form of addictive behavior. Recently, however, the relentless expansion of desire has come to be seen as a strength rather than a weakness of capitalist regimes. To understand this change socialists must consider whether there is a point to consumer spending that goes beyond satisfaction with what one gets. Freud's notion of (...) instinctual ambivalence illuminates the ways in which spending itself is a fusion of the desires to lose and to gain. This helps to explain how the socialist distinction between satisfying and addictive consumption misses the mark. Broadening this insight, we can see that Western thought about justice, originating in Judeo-Christian theology, conceals a fundamental ambivalence about both domination and gain by suggesting that inequality (beginning with that between God and man) is justified when the dominating party loses and the gainer submits. Ironically, however, the new post-utilitarian rationale for capitalism undermines this putative justification of social inequality in consumer-oriented capitalist societies by bringing our internal ambivalence about gain and dominance to the surface. This development creates an opportunity for a new beginning in Marxian social theory. The final sections of the essay suggest that social theory has been trapped in a debate over whether predators (and their human counterparts) kill in order to eat or eat in order to kill (Marx vs. Nietzsche). To break this trap we must shift the basis of social criticism from the metaphor of predation to the metaphor of parasitism. This changes the focus of critical analysis from unmasking the predator in every situation to identifying in every social structure the mechanisms of incorporation, mutual subversion, asymmetrical exchange, and surplus-creation (as distinct from equilibrium). If neither the desire for gain nor the desire for dominance are self-explanatory, then the Marxian critique of Nietzsche and the Nietzschean critique of Marxism both have valid points. The essay concludes with reflections about the importance of addressing the post-utilitarian rationale of capitalism with the same depth and comprehensiveness that we find in Marx's critique of its utilitarian rationale. (shrink)

This paper offers some brief reflections on pragmatist themes in Georg Simmel’s philosophy. §1 presents a number of assessments – by Simmel’s contemporaries, by later interpreters, and by Simmel himself – concerning his proximity to pragmatism. §2 offers a reconstruction of Simmel’s 1885-paper “The Relationship between the Theory of Selection and Epistemology,” focusing in particular on what the argument owed to von Helmholtz. It was this paper first and foremost that suggested to many that Simmel was close to pragmatism. §§3-5 (...) follow the development of the core idea of the 1885-paper in Simmel’s subsequent writings. §§6-8 compare and contrasts Simmel’s views on evolution and truth with the positions of Peirce, James, and Dewey. §9 returns to the overall question whether Simmel was a pragmatist and offers an irenic answer. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is external versus internal explanations, first, of the genesis of evolutionary theory and, second, its reception. Victorian England was highly competitive and individualistic. So was the view of society promulgated by Malthus and the theory of evolution set out by Charles Darwin and A.R. Wallace. The fact that Darwin and Wallace independently produced a theory of evolution that was just as competitive and individualistic as the society in which they lived is taken as evidence for (...) the impact that society has on science. The same conclusion is reached with respect to the reception of evolutionary theory. Because Darwin's contemporaries lived in such a competitive and individualistic society, they were prone to accept a theory that exhibited these same characteristics. The trouble is that Darwin and Wallace did not live in anything like the same society and did not formulate the same theory. Although the character of Victorian society may have influenced the acceptance of evolutionary theory, it was not the competitive, individualistic theory that Darwin and Wallace set out but a warmer, more comforting theory. (shrink)

A long tradition, which starts with the metaphor of the wax tablet presented in the Theaetetus of Plato, leads us to think that the relationship between mental representation and the represented reality is in a certain way mechanical or automatic. But the truth is that the conventional aspects of signification make it impossible to understand it as a physical- mechanical process. The computer sciences, contrary to a superficial vision, do not support but rather disprove this mechanistic conception of rationality, confirming (...) that semiosis can only occur in free subjects, that is to say, not completely subject to the laws of matter. (shrink)

René Girard’s anthropology goes beyond Durkheim and Freud in seeking knowledge in literary, mythical, and religious texts. Girard’s primary intuition is that human culture originated in response to the danger of violent mimetic crises among increasingly intelligent hominins, whose imitation of each other’s desires led to conflict. These crises were resolved by the mechanism of emissary murder: the proto-human community came to focus its aggression on a single scapegoat whose unanimous lynching, by “miraculously” bringing peace, led to its ritual repetition (...) in sacrifice. Because this theory fails to found the signs of human language and worship on the deferral of spontaneous action, Girard can only attribute the internal peace necessary to the human community to the exhaustion of violent aggression. Instead, generative anthropology proposes that, beginning from the premise that the need to control internecine violence was the source of the human, an appropriative gesture toward an object of common desire, deferred out of fear of violence, becomes understood as a sign of the object’s sacred/interdicted status, after which it can be peacefully divided among the group. Following this originary event, the sacred/signifying universe of language and religion gradually comes to include the totality of human activity. (shrink)

Girardian anthropology tells us that the birth of human meaning and its signs are the result of a primitive catastrophe. But if these origins are exposed by the biblical record it is because another, transformative semiosis has opened in human existence. Girard’s seminal remarks on the Greek logos and the logos of John, endorsing Heidegger’s divorce of the two, demonstrate this claim and its source in the nonviolence of the gospel logos. In effect, there is a second catastrophe, one embedded (...) in the bible and reaching its full exposition in the cross, generating a new semiosis in humanity. The transformation may be measured by viewing the original semiosis in a Kantian frame, as a transcendental a priori structured by violence. The second catastrophe generates an equivalent new a priori of nonviolence. The work of Charles Peirce illustrates both the way in which interpretants (of signs) open us progressively to new meanings, and how this process may ultimately be conditioned by love. The catastrophe of the gospel, therefore, works both on the dramatic individual level, with Paul of the New Testament as the great example, but also in slow‑motion over semiotic history, changing the meaning of existence from violence to nonviolence. (shrink)

This workbook of "études" offers a collection of experimental texts for communal dialogue and discovery that crosses multiple academic disciplines, including: foundations of physics, metaphysics, theoretical biology, semiotics, cognitive science, linguistics, phenomenology, logic & mathematics, poetry and theology. Each étude probes limits, horizons and boundaries by implicitly bring into relation foundational issues that characterize different academic disciplines or systems of meaning formation. Some formal techniques are deployed the études. Most notable is the use of the “logic of three” to overcome (...) falsely totalizing images and inexorable dualities. This technique involves a particular kind of attunement to the “betweenness” of mediation that is not common in modern science. The attunement draws on the formal and precise movements of analysis in concert with the metaphoric and singular movements of synthesis. (shrink)

Triadic (systemical) logic can provide an interpretive paradigm for understanding how quantum indeterminacy is a consequence of the formal nature of light in relativity theory. This interpretive paradigm is coherent and constitutionally open to ethical and theological interests. -/- In this statement: -/- (1) Triadic logic refers to a formal pattern that describes systemic (collaborative) processes involving signs that mediate between interiority (individuation) and exteriority (generalized worldview or Umwelt). It is also called systemical logic or the logic of relatives. The (...) term "triadic logic" emphasizes that this logic involves mediation of dualities through an irreducibly triadic formalism. The term "systemical logic" emphasizes that this logic applies to systems in contrast to traditional binary logic which applies to classes. The term "logic of relatives" emphasizes that this logic is background independent (in the sense discussed by Smolin ). -/- (2) An interpretive paradigm refers to a way of thinking that generates an understanding through concepts, their inter-relationships and their connections with experience. -/- (3) Coherence refers to holistic integrity or continuity in the meaning of concepts that form an interpretation or understanding. -/- (4) Constitutionally open refers to an inherent dependence in principle of an interpretation or understanding on something outside of a specific discipline's discourse or domain of inquiry (epistemic system). Interpretations that are constitutionally open are incomplete in themselves and open to responsive, interdisciplinary discourse and collaborative learning. (shrink)