Peirce on Berkeley's nominalistic platonism

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 72, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 165-177

  Anderson, Douglas R ^a   Groff, Peter S ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 80053746415     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq199872215     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. All Peirce references will be as follows. CP=ColIected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 1-6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 7-8, ed. A. Burks (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1931-58)
2. with volume and paragraph number. W=Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 1-5, ed. Max H. Fisch et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
3. MS=The Charles S. Peirce Papers, microfilm (Cambridge: Harvard University), with manuscript and page number.
4. For an excellent treatment of Peirce's realism and its relation to Scotus and other scholastics, see John Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963).
5. Peirce indicates that he understood Berkeley to deny that there is "true continuity in the real world" and he took continuity to be exemplary of generality. Turrisi, Patricia. Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Lectures on Pragmatism (Albany, SUNY Press, 1997).
6. Cornelis de Waal, "The Real Issue Between Nominalism and Realism: Peirce and Berkeley Reconsidered," Transactions of the Charles S. Society, 3, Summer (1996), 437.
7. In his fourth pragmatism lecture of 1903, Peirce examined other metaphysical systems by assessing which of his three categories they took into account. For an extended treatment of his own alternate conception of the real see these 1903 lectures in Turrisi. See also CP 6.327-28 and 5.430-35. For thorough secondary discussions, see Boler, 117-44 and Christopher Hookway, Peirce (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 36-40 and 112-17.
8. For an extended look at Peirce's evolutionary realism, see Carl Hausman, Charles S. Peirce 's Evolutionary Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.) Of course, Peirce took ordinary nominalists such as Pearson to be even more at odds with experience in their belief that the "Universe is aheap of sand whose grains have nothing to do with one another ⋯" (MS 641, 23).
9. It is worth noting that, for Peirce, persons are also signs. That is, our own individuality involves generality in an essential way (see 6.344 and W. 2, 241). For an excellent treatment of Peirce's conception of persons, see Vincent Colapietro, Peirce 's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).
10. Edward C. Morre, "The Influence of Duns Scotus on Peirce." Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce's Second Series. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), 409.
11. Peirce wrote a review of Pearson's The Grammar of Science in 1901, that highlights his concerns over the marriage of nominalism and modern science. See CP 8.132-52.