Abduction and the origin of "musement": Peirce's "Neglected Argument for the Reality Of God"

International Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 49, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 459-471

  Salas, Elizabeth ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84875345567     PISSN: 00190365     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/ipq200949463     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. From a 1913 letter to Frederic Adams Woods (CP 8.384), cited in The Essential Peirce, vol. II., edited by Nathan Houser, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1998), p. 553 n7 (hereafter EP).
2. Thomas A. Sebeok, I Think I Am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (New York: Springer, 1986), p. 174. In my references to Peirce, unless otherwise noted, I use the Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss.
3. EP I, pp. 190-91, "D, I, and H." See also Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. I: 1857-1866, ed. Max H. Fisch (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 29-30 (hereafter WCP I).
4. In 1903 Peirce gave the following account of this discovery: "With this hint [inferring the rule from the minor premise and the conclusion] as to the nature of induction, I at once remarked that if this be so there ought to be a form of inference which infers the Minor premiss from the major and the conclusion. Moreover, Aristotle was the last of men to fail to see this. I looked along further and found that. Aristotle opens the 25th [chapter of the Prior Analytics] with a description of the inference of the minor premiss from the major and the conclusion." Quoted in Murray Murphey, The Development of Peirce's Philosophy (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961), p. 60.
5. See Murphey's discussion of Peirce's essay "On the Distinction between A Priori and A Posteriori," pp. 60-61.
6. See his essay, "What is Abduction? The Fundamental Problem of Contemporary Epistemology" in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34.3 (1998).
7. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (New Haven CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1954), p. 67. The work was first published in 1795.
8. Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. I: 1857-1866 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982), p. 11.
9. In his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Meridian, 1955), esp. chaps. 3 and 4, Jacques Maritain argues that at work in poetic creation and mystical contemplation (and, I would add, scientific discovery) is a kind of "meta-faculty" that he calls the "spiritual preconscious" (see, e.g., pp. 66-69), to distinguish it from the "animal" or Freudian unconscious. Operating "in darkness," i.e., outside the normal modes of propositional and argumentative thought, Maritain argues that, nonetheless, "this free life of the intellect is also cognitive and productive, it obeys an inner law of expansion and generosity, which carries it along towards the manifestation of the creativity of the spirit; and it is shaped and quickened by creative intuition" (p. 79).
10. For this and subsequent references to Aristotle, I use Benjamin Jowett's translation in Basic Writings of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
11. See, e.g., Politics VIII.3.1337b34-1338a1.
12. Cf., e.g., Nicomachean Ethics X.7 1178a1.