> On Nov 19, 2015, at 2:03 PM, Jerry LR Chandler <jerry_lr_chand...@me.com> > wrote: > > On Nov 19, 2015, at 2:42 PM, Clark Goble wrote: > >> Peirce just doesn’t see the whole universe in those terms unlike Leibniz or >> Spinoza. > > Your judgment is hard for me accept. > > I could argue that CSP not only sees the whole universe, but he see's it with > the exquisite details available only to those that have mastered the chemical > symbol system, it's logic and its extension to life itself.
I was more thinking in terms of his fairly explicit writing on fundamental ontology. While I confess it’s these areas I find Peirce most speculative and hardest to take seriously, they are there. Again I’d point people to Kelly Parker’s work on this in “Peirce as neoPlatonist.” While there are one or two places I have some problems with the paper, overall it’s hard to argue with that this forms an important aspect of Peirce’s cosmology. http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html <http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html> The key passage from Peirce I think relevant to your questions is this one: Out of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something, by the principle of Firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense after the first, because resulting from it. Then there would have come other successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency to take them ever strengthening themselves, until the events would have been bound together into something like a continuous flow. The quasi-flow which would result would, however, differ essentially from time in this respect, that it would not necessarily be in a single stream. Different flashes might start different streams, between which there should be no relations of contemporaneity or succession. So one stream might branch into two, or two might coalesce. But the further result of habit would inevitably be to separate utterly those that were long separated, and to make those which presented frequent common points coalesce into perfect union. Those that were completely separated would be so many different worlds which would know nothing of one another; so that the effect would be just what we actually observe. (CP 1.412) Again we needn’t accept Peirce on this but I don’t think we can dismiss it as a part of Peirce’s thinking. (Recognizing we need to keep clear dates for the various writings) Now whether we take this as quanta obtaining continuum or in other phenomena continuum achieving quanta seems a slightly different issue. Peirce sees habits as the ontological underpinning of what we’d call matter and I’d call the measurable. Whether we can as a practical matter relate this more neoPlatonic ontology to the practical requirements of contemporary quantum field theory is yet still an other matter. I should note that this paper of Parker’s is tied to his book on Peirce, The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought. It’s an interesting introduction to Peirce as well as a focus on Peirce’s notion of continuity. I find it very good although not as technical as some others on the same subject (like say Zalamea’s)
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