Re: SUO: Definition of life
John,
Slight exception to your comment:
"John F. Sowa" wrote:
> To dispose of the last sentence first, let me note that the concept
> of "God" does not occur as an explanatory factor in any arguments by
> either Peirce or Whitehead. They use that term in very few of their
> writings, and their notion of God is a rather pantheistic notion that
> is simiar to Einstein's. It is essentially the ultimate spirit of
> the universe, and they never use that notion to explain anything that
> cannot be much more easily explained by very direct observation.
Peirce (somewhat surprisingly in view of some of his writings) apparently
became extremely religious after a personal experience of God when he was at
the bottom of his luck, sometime during his fifties. He became a practicing
Episcopalian (his thinking was much more like a medieval Catholic than he ever
truly came to grips with, by some accounts). His beef was more with the
embodiment/failures of organized religion rather than the idea of a personal
God.
The book "A Thief of Peirce" by Kenneth Ketner, a compilation of letters on
Peirce between Walker Percy and Ketner (who is the C.S. Peirce chair at Texas
Tech), discusses the contextual background of some of Peirce's published and
unpublished writings.
I agree with you in terms of God not playing an explicit role in his
(phenomenological) thinking (at least by the papers that I've read).
Mike