Re: SUO: Definition of life
Mike,
I agree that Peirce became more religious later in his life, and
in the second edition of his biography, Joe Brent says that Peirce
experienced some sort of mystical experience when he was visiting
St. Thomas (Episcopal) Church in New York.
He also made some remarks about the Holy Trinity -- Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit -- corresponding to his categories of Firstness,
Secondness, and Thirdness:
1. God the Father is the creator, who accomplishes his works
independently of anything else.
2. God the Son comes down to earth to establish a dyadic relation
between God and humanity.
3. God the Holy Spirit is the mediator, who brings wisdom, etc.
However, Peirce never uses this analogy as evidence for his categories.
On the contrary, he uses his categories to explain how people come to
classify various phenomena, including their religious beliefs. Modern
anthropologists, for example, study how various religions and cultures
classify concepts without being themselves adherents of those religions.
Mike Frentz wrote:
MF> (his thinking was much more like a medieval Catholic than he ever
> truly came to grips with, by some accounts).
Peirce certainly studied medieval logic and philosophy in great depth,
but his interest was primarily stimulated by his interest in logic.
He once boasted that he had the largest collection of medieval
manuscripts on logic in the Boston area (which includes Harvard).
In his writings, he frequently cites the medieval (and ancient)
writings on logic, but doesn't say much about medieval theology.
In my commentary on Peirce's manuscript 514, I point out the continuity
between Ockham's model-theoretic style of reasoning and Peirce's style
(which was very directly influenced by Ockham). That connection makes
Peirce sound much more modern than Frege (who never studied any of the
medieval work). See
http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514.htm
In any case, I agree with your conclusion:
MF> 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).
John Sowa