Chapter I THE BEGINNINGS OF PHENOMENOLOGY INTRODUCTORY Prefatory Remarks The writer of this monograph on the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce will ...

This influential study of Kant in which Strawson seeks to detach the true analytical and critical achievement of Kant's work from the unacceptable metaphysics with which it is entangled. This title available in eBook format. Click here for more information.Visit our eBookstore at: www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature.

Christopher Hookway presents a series of studies of themes from the work of the great American philosopher and pragmatist, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1913). These themes center on the question of how we are to investigate the world rationally. Hookway shows how Peirce's ideas about this continue to play an important role in contemporary philosophy.

Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...

Previously published: London: Methuen, 1975.

Charles Sanders Peirce has been characterized as the greatest American philosophic genius. He is the creator of pragmatism and one of the founders of modern logic. James, Royce, Schroder, and Dewey have acknowledged their great indebtedness to him. A laboratory scientist, he made notable contributions to geodesy, astronomy, psychology, induction, probability, and scientific method. He introduced into modern philosophy the doctrine of scholastic realism, developed the concepts of chance, continuity, and objective law, and showed the philosophical significance of the theory (...) of signs and mathematical logic. The present series is the first published edition of his systematic works. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to apply Charles S. Peirce's pragmatic method to establishing if proponents of transcendental arguments could hold the conclusions of their arguments to be fallibly known. I will thus propose a pragmatic clarification of the concepts of a priority, necessity, and infallibility in order to ascertain if these concepts are unavoidably related or not. I will argue that an a priori knowable necessary proposition is not in principle indubitable, whereas a proposition infallibly known is so. (...) Finally, I will apply these reflections to transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

This entirely new translation of Critique of Pure Reason by Paul Guyer and Allan Wood is the most accurate and informative English translation ever produced of this epochal philosophical text. Though its simple, direct style will make it suitable for all new readers of Kant, the translation displays a philosophical and textual sophistication that will enlighten Kant scholars as well. This translation recreates as far as possible a text with the same interpretative nuances and richness as the original.

The paper interprets Peirce's philosophy as a critical revival of Kant's idea of transcendental philosophy. The paper adopts, clarifies and extends the Peirce interpretation of the German philosopher K O Apel. In so doing, it shows Peirce to have articulated insights into meaning, knowledge and truth still of relevance today and to have identified important problems to which he proposed novel and still instructive solutions. (edited).

This paper aims to shed light on the role played by purposefulness in Peirce’s account of thought by means of a comparison with Kant’s regulative principles. Purposefulness, as an orientation toward an end involved in a thought process, is distinguished from purposiveness, as conformity to an end. Peirce’s architectonic, cosmology, and theory of natural classes are briefly analyzed in light of these concepts. Then, a comparison between Peirce’s esthetic ideal and regulative hopes and Kant’s regulative ideas and principle of purposiveness (...) is undertaken. This comparison, while allowing us to find a solution for some difficulties, especially some regarding Peirce’s esthetics, shows how purposefulness is far more important for the American thinker. Thus, purposefulness and purposiveness turn out to be primarily regulative principles of our thought. As such, they allow us to identify a transcendental level in Peirce’s philosophy, avoiding the inconsistencies that have been attributed to Karl-Otto Apel’s account. (shrink)

Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text.

: This paper considers Peirce's epistemology against the background of its Kantian legacy. While various interpreters like R. Rorty, K.-O. Apel and J. Habermas have claimed that Peirce remained a Kantian philosopher, the thesis defended here is that Peirce rejected several of Kant's epistemological dichotomies, such as the transcendental-empirical and the a priori-a posteriori dichotomy. In particular, the paper considers an epistemological project which has been largely neglected in the literature: Peirce's semiotic analysis of assertions. This analysis reconstructs various sign (...) forms as elements of assertions and as pre-theoretic conditions for formal logic and for scientific inquiry. The paper shows how this analysis bears on modern philosophical research on indexicals, and also on pragmatically oriented philosophy of language more generally. (shrink)

Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text. Until recently most readers, ascribing broadly Cartesian assumptions to Kant, have concluded that the _Critique_ advances an idealist philosophy, because Kant calls it "transcendental idealism" and because the work abounds in apparent confirmations of that interpretation. Collins maintains not only that this reading of Kant is false but also that it conceals Kant's real achievements. To counter it, he addresses the (...) themes and passages in the _Critique_ that seem to require an idealist thesis and shows how they may be better understood without ascribing any idealist philosophy to Kant. His account coheres with Kant's explicit "refutations" of idealism, it fits Kant's rejection of the imputation of idealism to him by early critics and readers, and it validates Kant's contention that the second edition of the _Critique_ changes the expression but not the doctrine of the first. (shrink)

The author of this paper explores a central strand in the complex relationship between Peirce and Kant. He argues, against Kant (especially as reconstructed by Christine Korsgaard), that the practical identity of the self-critical agent who undertakes a Critic of reason (as Peirce insisted upon translating this expression) needs to be conceived in substantive, not purely formal, terms. Thus, insofar as there is a reflexive turn in Peirce, it is quite far from the transcendental turn taken by Immanuel Kant. The (...) identity of the being devoted to redefining the bounds of reason (for the drawing of such bounds is always a historically situated and motivated undertaking) is not that of a disembodied, rational will giving laws to itself. Nor is it that of a being whose passions and especially sentiments are heteronomous determinations of the deliberative agency in question. Rather the identity of this being is that of a somatic, social, and historical agent whose very autonomy not only traces its origin to heteronomy but also ineluctably involves an identification with what, time and again, emerges as other than this agent. A strong claim is made regarding human identity being practical identity (practical identity being understood here as the singular shape acquired by a human being in the complex course of its practical involvements, its participation in the array of practices in and through which such a being carries out its life). An equally strong claim is made regarding the upshot of Peirce's decisive movement beyond Kant's transcendental project: this movement unquestionably drives toward a compelling account of human agency. (shrink)