John
At 03:06 PM 2014-06-17, Søren Brier wrote:
Dear John
What term other than God would you find better? We are talking about the ultimate reality that holds everything else together and is you most intimate connection to reality and meaning. I find your example of the Higgs boson is very misleading and a bit offending. Makes me wonder if you have really understood me.
Best
Søren
Fra: John Collier [ mailto:colli...@ukzn.ac.za]
Sendt: 17. juni 2014 06:38
Til: Edwina Taborsky; Søren Brier; Catherine Legg; Gary Richmond; g...@gnusystems.ca
Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Emne: Re: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1
I concur with Edwina; I see no reason to call the real here 'god'. I have taken a similar line in my classes for decades when looking at what Aquinas' Five Ways would imply (Aquinas, of course, does not make Peirce's distinction between existence and reality, so his use of 'existence' is misleading at best).
In fact I find this sort of 'god' talk misleading, in much the same way as calling the Higgs boson 'the God particle' is misleading.
John
At 07:49 AM 2014-06-16, Edwina Taborsky wrote:
Thanks, Soren, for this outline - very nice. In particular, the brief and succinct account:
God is real but does not exists and therefore is not conscious and cannot have a will based on a personhood as it is understood by most Theists. Therefore the whole creationist concept of a conscious plan in the creation of the world would collapses and only Peirces synechist and thycistic semiotic Agapism remains. As in evolutionary epistemology there is a deep connection between the process of human cognition , ecology and evolution in the form of semiosis combination of chance, love and logic.
The differentiation between 'reality' and 'the existence' is important, as is the location of 'will' within existentiality rather than within reality.
Even though I'm an atheist and don't accept the notion of 'god', I do accept the notion of reality - a reality that is rational, evolving, logical and that acknowledges chance and love.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Søren Brier
To: Catherine Legg ; Gary Richmond ; g...@gnusystems.ca
Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2014 9:34 AM
Subject: SV: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1
Dear Cathy
Thank you for your appreciation of my work. It is heartwarming coming from such a good philosopher ! The references came from the fact that a lot of my writing was based on those two article that was not accepted by the referees of the Centennial conference, probably because this is a dangerous area in Peirces philosophy for many analytically trained philosophers.
There is no doubt that Peirces evolutionary process view combined with his fallibilism adds something to both Buddhism and Christianity as also Hartshorne see it in his development of a process theology. Thus evolution is Gods way of creating the world. The problem with this understanding for most ordinary Christians is that it would demand a change in their concept of God to Peirces: God is real but does not exists and therefore is not conscious and cannot have a will based on a personhood as it is understood by most Theists. Therefore the whole creationist concept of a conscious plan in the creation of the world would collapses and only Peirces synechist and thycistic semiotic Agapism remains. As in evolutionary epistemology there is a deep connection between the process of human cognition , ecology and evolution in the form of semiosis combination of chance, love and logic. John Archibald Wheelers it from bit participatory universe is the closest a modern philosophical physicist has come to Peirces vision. But as most physicist Wheeler is basing his view on an information theoretical view and fails on establishing the reflective phenomenological basis, which that is so foundational to Peirces pragmaticist semiotics and view of the natural light of reasoning.
J.A. Wheeler (1990). Information, physics, Quantum: The search for links, pp. 3-29 in W.H. Zurek (Ed.). Complexity, entropy and the physics of information. Vol. VIII in Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of complexity. Addison Wesley publishing Company.
Best
Søren
Fra: Catherine Legg [ mailto:cl...@waikato.ac.nz]
Sendt: 16. juni 2014 07:09
Til: Søren Brier; Gary Richmond; g...@gnusystems.ca
Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Emne: RE: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1
Hi all,
Im very behind on this thread, but have been reading and enjoying it. I just havent had the chance to pull my thoughts together enough to post.
First of all, a big thank you to Søren for starting us off with such wonderfully erudite postings even including bibliographies which are a resource for all of us to keep and refer to in the future!
I have a bit of background knowledge of world religion and certain spiritual traditions, but have certainly learned quite a bit more through this thread about key ideas in Buddhism, Dogen, St John of the Cross, and more.
Totally agree with you Søren about the way the phenomenological tradition has done useful ground work for this area of philosophy but is still regarded with suspicion by the mainstream.
Thank you to those (Gary R, Gary F and Søren spring to mind) who were willing to describe a little of their own mystical (or otherwise spiritual) experiences in this public forum. This kind of candour and trust is what makes philosophy a truly enriching exercise, and peirce-l a valuable forum.
Gary F I was very interested in the way you highlighted the role of the *natural light of reason* in Peirces philosophy as giving him a distinctive take on these questions. Im very interested in that as Im still pursuing iconic signification as a kind of direct seeing to break the deadlock of pointless attempts at discursive explanations in current epistemology.
Eugene I loved what you said about naturalistic philosophy relying on a subnatural conception of nature. Very good.
I wonder if the thread has paid enough attention to what Peirce was saying in some of the quotes that were posted about his cosmology being *hyperbolic* (i.e. evolutionary), and the mode of evolution being jumping into the fray of life and testing hypotheses. This would distinguish Peirces views from both Christianity and Buddhism wouldnt it?
Cheers, Cathy
From: Søren Brier [mailto:sb....@cbs.dk ]
Sent: Tuesday, 3 June 2014 5:44 a.m.
To: Stephen C. Rose; Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Subject: SV: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1
Dear Stev(ph)en and list
About the meaning of spirituality. I am presently reading Basarab Nicolescu (2014): From modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Culture and Spirituality
On p. 13 here expressed the transcultural experience of reality in a very eloquent way, that I find very close to Peirce pure Zero or Tohu va Bohu and Nargajunas emptiness from which all things co-arise:
The perception of the transcultural is, first of all, an experience, because it concerns the silence of different actualizations. The space between the levels of reality is the space of this silence. It is the equivalent, in interior space, of what is called the quantum vacuum in exterior space. It is a full silence, structured in levels. There are as many levels of silences as there are correlations between levels of perception and levels of reality. And beyond all these levels of silence, there is another quality of silence, that place-without-place that the poet Michel Casmus calls our luminous ignorance. This nucleus of silence appears to us as an unknowable because it is the unfathomable well of knowledge, but this unknowable is luminous because it illuminates the very structure of knowledge. The levels of silence and the levels of our luminous ignorance determine our lucidity.
Best
Søren
Fra: Stephen C. Rose [mailto:stever...@gmail.com]
Sendt: 1. juni 2014 20:16
Til: Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu
Emne: Re: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1
Steven - Hope your hospital stay has good results.
It's funny to think of my resonance with Peirce in light of the fact of my seminary training and lifelong work as both a representative and critic of the church. I see little or no distinction between Peirce's thinking as a whole and his thinking that explicitly relates to theology and religion. To make this distinction sets him up for the charges you levy. I am not sure on what basis your general observations on the relative spiritualities within the Peirce family rest, but I tend to take them as less than substantiated by evidence. I could be wrong. But I have studies some in the areas of American and English universalism and its morphing into the less interesting (to me) and more predictable unitarianism. I think CSP may have more affinity with the earliest universalists and that these have some odd but not insignificant ties to some views of the late Karl Barth and even to Paul. CSP reserves great acidity for what he regards as a failing of John, the assumed author of the Fourth Gospel, and perhaps also of the Book of Revelation. I think Peirce is foundational in any discussion of holism, moving past Snow, and getting to some understanding of Christianity past the fundamentalist culture religion that has largely supplanted both neo-orthodoxy and liberalism. Best, S
On Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 1:56 PM, Steven Ericsson-Zenith <ste...@iase.us> wrote:
Dear Soren,
My apologizes for the delayed response (I am hospitalized currently). My comment deserves clarification as Soren suggests.
In brief, Charles' really should not be considered seriously with respect to social religion and his relationship with formal religion except through his Neglected Agument (yet another advocacy of his semiotic). God certainly is not something he "worships" in any traditional sense and his advocacy of "worship" is not at all religious ( but painfully manipulative and social). His father and brother are different and more holistic in this regard. If there is a commonreligious thread between them it is positivism. But Charles, in my view, should be dismissed.
At some point Stanford will make my January talk on this subject available.
Steven
On Saturday, May 31, 2014, Søren Brier <sb....@cbs.dk> wrote:
Dear Steven
It is obvious not so to me. So, would you care to explain us why you think so? That would be an interesting contribution to our discussion. I have long felt that although we in many ways were on the same track, there were also some deep disagreement on basic interpretations. But I have not been able to put my finger on it. Maybe you can?
Cheers
Søren
Fra: stevenzen...@gmail.com [ mailto:stevenzen...@gmail.com] På vegne af Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Sendt: 31. maj 2014 01:19
Til: Søren Brier
Cc: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu; Kathrine Elizabeth Lorena Johansson; Claudia Jacques (c...@claudiajacques.org); Elisabeth Sørup; Seth Miller; Leslie Combs
Emne: Re: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1
Contradictory and I doubt Peircean.
Steven
On Monday, May 19, 2014, Søren Brier <sb....@cbs.dk> wrote:
1. God is real but does not exist: so the best way to worship him is through the religion of science
I thought this sums up nicely Section 9.6 in Kees book and was a good way to start the discussion of: God, science and religion. Peirces theory of the relation between science and religion is one of the most controversial aspects of his pragmaticist semiotics only second to his evolutionary objective idealism influenced by Schelling (Niemoczynski and Ejsing) and based on his version of Duns Scotus extreme scholastic realism, which Kees did an exemplary presentation of as well. Peirces view of religion and how science is deeply connected to it in a way that differs from what any other philosopher has suggested except Whiteheads process philosophy, but there are also important differences here.
I have no quarrels with Kees exemplary understandable formulations in the short space he has. That leaves opportunity for us to discuss all the interesting aspects he left out like Peirces Panentheism (Michael Raposa , Clayton and Peacock), his almost Neo-Platonist (Kelly Parker http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html ) metaphysics of emptiness or Tohu va Bohu (see also Parker) and ongoing creation in his process view, and from this basic idea of emptiness ( that is also foundational to Nargajunas Buddhism of the middle way ) a connection to Buddhism. This was encouraging Peirce to see Buddhism and Christianity in their purest mystical forms integrated into an agapistic Buddhisto-Christian process view of God. Brent mentions an unsent letter from Peirces hand describing a mystical revelation in the second edition of the biography. This idea of Buddhisto-Christianity was taken up by Charles Hartshorne - one of the most important philosophers of religion and metaphysicians of the twentieth century - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hartshorne/ who also wrote about Whiteheads process view of the sacred (see references).
I have collected many of the necessary quotes and interpreted them in this article http://www.transpersonalstudies.org/ImagesRepository/ijts/Downloads/A%20Peircean%20Panentheist%20Scientific%20Mysticism.pdf , and in Brier 2012 below.
Even Peirces evolutionary objective idealism is too much to swallow for most scientists who are not fans of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. So even today it is considering a violation of rationality to support an evolutionary process objective idealism like Peirces, which include a phenomenological view. Even in the biosemiotic group this is dynamite. We have h
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Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
Http://web.ncf.ca/collier
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