Jeff, you're quite right that Peirce's phenomenological practice, as a search for the "elements of experience," can be traced back to very early in his career. He says as much himself in a draft of his Carnegie application (1902):
In May 1867 I presented to the Academy in Boston a paper of ten pages, or about 4000 words, upon a New List of Categories. It was the result of full two years' intense and incessant application. It surprises me today that in so short a time I could produce a statement of that sort so nearly accurate, especially when I look back at my notebooks and find by what an unnecessarily difficult route I reached my goal. For this list of categories differs from the lists of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel in attempting much more than they. They merely took conceptions which they found at hand, already worked out. Their labor was limited to selecting the conceptions, slightly developing some of them, arranging them, and in Hegel's case, separating one or two that had been confused with others. But what I undertook to do was to go back to experience, in the sense of whatever we find to have been forced upon our minds, and by examining it to form clear conceptions of its radically different classes of elements, without relying upon any previous philosophizing, at all. This was the most difficult task I ever ventured to undertake. Gary f. From: Jeffrey Brian Downard [mailto:jeffrey.down...@nau.edu] Sent: 15-Oct-17 03:02 To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu; g...@gnusystems.ca Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Lowell Lecture 1.10 John S, Gary F, List, In response to Gary F's remarks about the first Lowell Lecture, John S says: "His study of logic certainly does not grow out of phenomenology." I tend to think that the conceptual point Gary F has made about the study of the elements of the phenomena we might observe in common experience does apply to the chronological development of Peirce's work in logic--including the development of both the mathematical systems of logic and as well as the normative theory of logic. The simple fact that Peirce didn't use the term "phenomenology" to classify this area of inquiry as a separate branch of philosophy in his early work doesn't negate the fact that Peirce was engaged in the careful study of the phenomena from early on in the early Harvard and Lowell lectures of 1865-6 and in "On a New List of the Categories". This seems to be well supported by the point John makes next: "But I would guess that his experience in math, logic, and science guided the ways he thought about everything -- including elements." It was not just the results of Peirce's inquiries in math, logic and science that guided the way he thought. Rather, the examination of the relations involved in using diagrams to reason about questions in math and logic served as a basis for his conclusions about the elemental categories of all experience--and tended to confirm his earlier analyses of the elements involved, for instance, in our common experience of such things as spatiality, temporality, and the growth of our understanding. --Jeff Jeffrey Downard Associate Professor Department of Philosophy Northern Arizona University (o) 928 523-8354
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