Abstract: This essay, originally presented as the 2026 Presidential Address to the Charles S. Peirce Society, looks at Peirce’s sciences of discovery while asking, which Peirce does not, when the search for truth for its own sake is legitimate and when it is not. To clarify this omission, the essay situates Peirce within the history of Western reflection on curiosity and the various taboos surrounding the desire to know. The essay next examines whether Peirce’s method- centered approach to the sciences of discovery can withstand twentieth-century challenges, to which the answer is that it cannot. Following Peirce’s approach where logic (and pragmatism) is grounded in ethics and aesthetics (or esthetics), I propose a pragmatism mindful of stewardship by taking the position that Peirce’s esthetics identifies fostering the growth of reasonableness as the highest good.
Abstract: The standard interpretation of Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief” is that it is supposed to be an argument for the superiority of science as a method of fixing beliefs. But the standard interpretation gives no explanation for why tenacity, authority, and a priori reasoning are the rivals, and these supposed rivals are never really refuted: tenacity is frankly better at fixing beliefs than the fallibilistic scientific method. Even worse, Peirce seems to cheat by judging science by a different standard. I propose instead that “Fixation” was written for an audience who was already pro-science and that the supposed rivals are instead vivid illustrations of what science is not. Furthermore, I propose that Peirce is again trying to take James’s advice to make his thoughts more accessible, this time by using a dialectical argument as a heuristic devise for a popular audience who might already know some Hegel. A dialectical interpretation can solve the problems generated by the standard interpretation: why these rivals, why no refutations, and why science is judged differently. Lastly, I suggest that Peirce was trying to out-Hegel the Hegelians by using their own beloved dialectic to show the superiority of the scientific method.
Abstract: This paper offers a new interpretation of a puzzling passage in Charles S. Peirce’s 1892 essay “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” (DNE), where he speaks of the “inevitable consequences” of the hypothesis of tychism that purportedly agree with observed facts. I argue that in this passage, Peirce is alluding to his astronomical work attempting to determine the curvature of space , which he was carrying out at the same time as writing DNE. By highlighting a hitherto unnoticed link between tychism and the geometry of space, I show why Peirce should have regarded these investigations as lending empirical support to his anti-deterministic doctrine. This connection will serve to illuminate one specific aspect of the impact that non-Euclidean geometry had on Peirce’s philosophy—an influence that, despite its significance, has remained largely unexplored.
Abstract: Professors Bellucci, Ambrosio, Kasser, and Wilson make incisive remarks on my book Peirce on Inference . I endeavor to respond to the concerns they raise and to extend the conversation pertaining to Peirce’s theory inference.
Abstract: This essay has its point of departure in an observation: The monumental history of philosophy that Jürgen Habermas has published has as its guiding thread the relationship between religion and philosophy, faith and knowledge. It culminates in a presentation of the philosophy of Charles Peirce. But, oddly, it has nothing to say about Peirce's own understanding of religion and the relationship between religion and philosophy. The essay briefly summarizes the present state of knowledge on Peirce and religion and then confronts it not so much with debates in theology or philosophy of religion, as others have done in the last decades, but with the interdisciplinary empirical study of religion. This happens in five steps (situated creativity, formation of beliefs with existential relevance, sacredness, the God concept, the ideal of universalism), The essay concludes with a short reflection on how Habermas's narrative would have had to change if the author had taken Peirce's contribution as seriously as it deserves.
Abstract: Charles Peirce begins his best-known text about religious metaphysics by defining the proper name "God" as Ens necessarium . In two previously unpublished manuscripts, he advocates the hypothesis of such a "necessary being" as the only "rational explanation" that is "adequate to account for the sum total of reality," namely, "the three universes" that together encompass "all the phenomena there are." Combining key statements from those passages into a series of distinct steps yields a cosmological argumentation for this conclusion, one resembling that of Gottfried Leibniz. In conjunction with Peirce's other relevant writings, it has implications for the attributes of God, as well as for the relationship between God and the universe, while also raising questions that call for further study.
The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative to the interpretation of Thoreau's first published book as a metaphor for an internal journey of self-improvement which will remove many critics' objections of digressions in the work. I propose that instead it should be understood as showing three processes within this journey: personal autonomy, understanding of natural materialism and the eventual finding of spiritual n which is eternal, not phenomenal, learned through meditation upon consciousness rather than through sensory perception. The key here is the understanding of higher law.
If an act can always be made consistent with other acts by defining a rule that covers of the observed cases, how can one know which rule one follows when one acts? This paper approaches this question through analysis of one strand of thinking in Charles Sanders Peirce's 1903 Harvard Lectures and in some entries that Peirce contributed the Century Dictionary. Peirce argues for strong form of "scholastic realism," which insists on the "reality of thirdness" of universals such as natural laws. The Harvard Lectures identify thirdness with Aristotelian "entelechy"-actuality or realization- and thus as a principle that is irreducible any combination of power and act. When being is in this state of realization, it signifies the universal. This paper argues that natural things realize natural laws and persons realize reasons, then acts can be rationally determined by a single rule that one is following.
In a recent paper exploring tensions between Peirce's theory of inquiry and his philosophy of probability, Stewart and Sterkenburg note persistent textual evidence suggesting that Peirce simply dismisses views that construe probabilities in terms of degrees of belief. Though they stop short of accusing Peirce of begging relevant questions, their discussion invites attention to whether Peirce genuinely argues against conceptualist approaches to probability, and if so, how he does so. This paper clarifies Peirce's target, presents the considerations he offers against conceptualism, and assesses them.
In this paper, I argue that Dewey's conception of experience in Experience and Nature, while explicitly engaging with James, also involved an original appropriation of James' radical empiricism through the lens of Hegel's legacy. However, the cultural climate of the 1920s prevented Dewey from making any overt reference to the German philosopher. Both thinkers' contributions converged in Dewey's development of a notion grounded in the primacy of relations over relata. Hegel's influence allowed Dewey to avoid the subjectivistic tendencies present in James' initial account of experience. At the same time, James' emphasis on the genuine plurality of experience and his profound anti-intellectualism enabled Dewey to resist reducing experience to mere cognition and nature to
In this commentary, I draw a lineage from William Whewell's account of ideas to what Richard Atkins insightfully singles out and develops as Peirce's account of "hypothetic induction" in his excellent book Peirce on Inference. I argue that Whewell is a key (and yet still much-neglected) interlocutor for Peirce, and that Peirce's grappling with Whewell's account of ideas in induction set him on a process of pragmatic clarification, which resulted precisely in his formulation of hypothetic induction and the role of guiding principles within it.
Peirce develops a nonpsychologistic theory of inference. He classifies the varieties of inference there are. He defends the validity of each kind of inference on the grounds of the roles they play in producing truth. Furthermore, he responds to arguments purporting to show that those genera of inference are not valid, such as the liar paradox and Hume's problem of induction.
Professors Bellucci, Ambrosio, Kasser, and Wilson make incisive remarks on my book Peirce on Inference. I endeavor to respond to the concerns they raise and to extend the conversation pertaining to Peirce's theory inference.
In 1829, Samuel Worcester was sentenced to four years of hard labor for his stance against the U.S government and the state of Georgia for their treatment of the Cherokee people. As a missionary who was sent to "civilize and Christianize", Worcester's political actions in siding with the Cherokee labeled him a traitor, not just to the United States, but more importantly to the advancement of settler colonialism in the Southeast. By looking at the example of Samuel Worcester, this paper explores Josiah Royce's idea of loyalty and what it means to become a traitor out of loyalty to the beloved community. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first is a historical analysis of Worcester in the context of mission work in the 1800's and the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee. The body of the paper looks at the philosophy of Josiah Royce and his notions of loyalty and betrayal. I argue that Worcester exemplified Royce's notions of Christian commitment to the beloved community, even when it came at great personal cost. I conclude with the ongoing relevance of Royce's philosophy as a tool of resistance.
This article offers a critical examination of some central components of Richard Atkins' Peirce on Inference. First, I discuss Atkins' reading of Peirce's notion of a "leading principle" as a conditional whose antecedent is simply the conjunction of an argument's premises (LPP). Drawing on Peirce's Baldwin Dictionary entry, I suggest instead that a leading principle is a general description of possible premises and conclusions (LLP), and that the alleged Peircean "confusion" between LPP and LLP is unsubstantiated. I then emphasize Peirce's distinction between logical and material principles and show how his account of the redundancy of logical leading principles both blocks Carroll's regress and supports his claim that every mental action is, in form, a valid inference. In the second part, I endorse Atkins' arguments against identifying Peirce's late abduction with his early hypothesis, but propose an alternative clarification of the distinction based on the different roles of explanandum and predictions. Finally, I question Atkins' typology of deduction and his identification of deduction with logical calculus, arguing instead that Peirce takes deductive logic to analyze mathematical reasoning and that deduction proceeds in stages-logical analysis being followed by demonstration, which may be corollarial or theorematic.
Charles Peirce begins his best-known text about religious metaphysics by defining the proper name "God" as Ens necessarium. In two previously unpublished manuscripts, he advocates the hypothesis of such a "necessary being" as the only "rational explanation" that is "adequate to account for the sum total of reality," namely, "the three universes" that together encompass "all the phenomena there are." Combining key statements from those passages into a series of distinct steps yields a cosmological argumentation for this conclusion, one resembling that of Gottfried Leibniz. In conjunction with Peirce's other relevant writings, it has implications for the attributes of God, as well as for the relationship between God and the universe, while also raising questions that call for further study.
The paper explores Alain Locke's views on Black American art. I look at what he thought constitutes Black American art and what he took good Black American art to achieve. As for the former, I examine two ways of looking at Black American art: (1) as defined by artists' expression of the emotional state or inner lives of Black Americans, and (2) as defined by certain formal qualities of the work itself. I show that Locke melded these two positions together in a unique way. In my discussion of what Locke took good Black American art to achieve, I engage (1) with his general theory of value, (2) with his thinking on aesthetic and artistic values more specifically, (3) with his metaphysics of race, before addressing his thoughts on what constitutes Black American art simpliciter, and on what it achieves when it is good art.
