Abstract

The vitality of Peirce's ideas has recently stimulated the writing of several books and articles. This is not strictly a revival, but rather the first systematic presentation to the philosophic public of what Peirce hoped was an architectonic philosophy. While some commentators find Peirce's work to consist merely of brilliant fragments of an ultimate failure, Potter believes that Peirce "has achieved a partial synthesis with gaps and inconsistencies, some of which at least can be remedied." In this book Potter distinguishes for study five aspects of Peirce's philosophy, and some of their relations to one another and to the whole Peirce had in mind. The aspects considered are the categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which can be very roughly characterized as potentiality, actuality, and necessity, or mediating law; the normative sciences of logic, ethics, and esthetics; pragmatism, of which the exposition in the 1870's was only the as yet unconnected beginning; synechism, the cosmology which Peirce thought proved pragmatism; and the Scotistic realism which Peirce felt to be essential to any authentic pragmatism. Peirce's divisions of philosophy correspond to his categories--phenomenology to Firstness and normative science to Secondness. Metaphysics, corresponding to Thirdness, attempts to comprehend the reality of the data of phenomenology and their interpretation by normative sciences. Although in no sense polemical, this careful study contains replies to most standard criticisms of the pragmatic theories of meaning and truth in its explication of the relation of pragmatism to the rest of Peirce's philosophy. In his second section Potter deals with synechism, the principle of continuity, and law, including a strong chapter on "Law as Living Power." The final section treats Peirce's accommodation of continuity and Darwinian evolutionary theory. If growth and development are fundamental throughout the cosmos, Peirce saw that we must admit real chance and its important implications for questions of determinism and mind. Potter makes a close study of Peirce which he shares with the reader, giving insights, and also a glimpse of the process which leads up to them. The concentration on norms and ideals, perhaps less familiar aspects of Peirce's philosophy, may encourage wider investigation of his writings by those who considered him only as a logician or the founder of pragmatism. This is a superior study, and an addition to the scholarly literature on one of America's major thinkers.--M. B. M.