> On Feb 15, 2017, at 9:16 AM, Eric Charles <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Further, when Peirce elsewhere starts making broad pronouncements about > "thought" it oftentimes seems that he is referring solely to those rare > instances of clear thinking, but other times is referring to the typical > thinking, or all thinking?
I think in places Peirce does wax dogmatic at times. At least rhetorically. But I think the better way to read him typically when making broad pronouncements is that he’s postulating a theory and is more than happy to see it critiqued. That his own views changed as he continues to think about the ideas is a good indication that this is how he himself takes such views. I’d add that I think the style of late 19th century writing is just alien to us. We expect that when reading early 19th or 18th century German idealists but I think we expect Americans writing in English to write in a style we’re more familiar with. However I tend to think most philosophers, especially the great ones, are pretty bad writers. Of all the great writers probably only Mill and Peirce are the ones I enjoy reading the most. Yet even with Peirce we have huge paragraphs and examples of annoying writing and neologisms. Part of the problem is often that it’s simply hard. Many philosophers invent neologisms because they want to avoid the habits of thinking that older words invoke. They want to break us out of those habits to rethink the issues without that baggage. This leads to difficulty especially when talking about broad foundational ideas. The ideas and words closest to us are often the hardest to examine closely. (Thus the traditional problem of “to be” in philosophy)
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