Charles Peirce did not seem to have a consistent view regarding ethics. His occasional remarks on this subject appear to be contradictory at best and cynical at worst. As a result, many have suggested that his comments on ethics, especially those expressed in the 1898 Cambridge Conference lectures, should be dismissed or ignored. This chapter argues that Peirce's views on ethics can be best understood by comparing them to his views on scholastic realism and nominalism. When analyzed in this way, (...) Peirce's observations on ethics can serve as the grounds for a robust moderate moral realism that can compare favorably with contemporary metaethical theories. (shrink)

This pioneering book presents a reconstitution of Charles Sanders Peirce philosophical system as a coherent architecture of concepts that form a unified theory of reality. Historically, the majority of Peircean scholars adopted a thematic approach to study isolated topics such as semiotics and pragmatism without taking into account the author’s broader philosophical framework, which led to a poor and fragmented understanding of Peirce’s work. In this volume, professor Ivo Assad Ibri, past president of The Charles Sanders Peirce Society and a (...) leading figure in the Brazilian community of Peircean scholars, adopts a systemic approach to Peirce’s thought and presents Peirce’s scientific metaphysics as a deep ontological architecture based on a semiotic logic and on pragmatism as criteria of meaning. Originally published in Portuguese, this book became a classic among Brazilian Peircean scholars by presenting a conceptual matrix capable of providing a clear reference system to ground the thematic studies into the broader Peircean system. Now translated to English, this reviewed, amplified and updated edition aims to make this contributions available to the international community of Peircean scholars and to serve as a tool to understand Peirce’s work in a more systemic way by integrating concepts such as experience, phenomenon, existence and reality, as well as theories such as Chance, Continuity, Objective Idealism, Cosmology and Pragmatism, in a coherent system that reveals Peirce’s complex metaphysical architecture. "As the philosophical reputation of Charles S. Peirce continues to rise to first-tier prominence in the history of American philosophy, Ivo Ibri’s Kósmos Noetós assumes a unique status in both a pioneering and a magisterial work of transcontinental Peirce scholarship. This original work of this internationally renowned scholar and editor, and Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of San Paulo, penetrates to the heart of Peirce’s architectonic system of phenomenological, metaphysical, and semiotic categories which heuristically characterize our world as “a universe perfused with signs.” Ibri’s own synergistic commentary on the radiating registers of Peirce’s cosmogonically and pragmatistically conceived “one intelligible theory of the universe” also instructively contributes to the illumination of significant nodes of interface with a range of relevant theoretical trends in the contemporary academy; as well, it places Peirce in the company of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, and Schelling who preceded Peirce in providing a legacy of first-tier reasoning on our intelligibly developing world. Kosmos Noetos impresses as Ibri’s pure, lucid, passionately thought-loving, philosophical articulation of his own and as the indispensable prolegomena to all future Peirce studies." David Dilworth, State University of New York at Stone Brook – USA "Ivo Ibri has offered us in this exquisite work a framing of the inner logic of Charles S. Peirce's core metaphysical vision and its existential implications. It is a deep and nuanced exploration of the internal dynamics of Peirce’s central metaphysical categories, developed through rigorous and detailed attention to the evolution of Peirce’s thought on the ‘vitally important topics’ of the appearing, the reality, and the intelligibility of the world. The two-leveled format of the book, an intricate weaving of Peirce’s texts and discursive elaboration and linkage by Ibri, gives it a distinctive feel and is the bedrock of its value. The book is a remarkable combination of presentation and analysis. It is informed by Ibri’s deep philosophical culture and is a gentle and convincing argument for the centrality of metaphysics in understanding Peirce’s thought. It offers in a new way indispensable suggestions for our own attempts to think about our places in an evolving universe with the aid of Peirce and offers threads of thought to be followed up by others." Robert E. Innis, University of Massachusetts Lowell – USA. (shrink)

Is there a poetic ground in Peirce's philosophy? While this question may sound interesting, it is somehow odd, as Peirce is well–known as a logician, and it is also known by scholars that he was not an expert in poetry, literature, art, or even theories concerning art in general. This paper hypothesizes that there is a starting point in his philosophy that is poetical in its nature. Moreover, Peirce's system is obviously logical in its form, but also keeps the spirit (...) of the original silent feeling of poetry that seems to have fascinated him. Also, I claim there is a Schellingian heritage in Peirce's philosophy that is partially responsible for that poetic starting point. This idea also has, as a support, the supposition that a realistic view of the world provides a hypothesis of symmetry between the human and natural worlds, which provides the basic form for his ontological theories and for the theoretical harmony among Peirce's doctrines. This quality of Peirce's philosophy is a kind of a Greek beauty that is only evident for those who can view his thought not in fragments but as a complex system that has the potency of not only answering classical philosophical questions, but also of giving rise to a new philosophy which needs to be further developed. (shrink)

The conceptual axis of this paper is a reflection on Charles Peirce’s realism, trying to show it as the ground from which many others of his philosophical doctrines are derived. In its first part, the paper analyses the problems posed by the classical Peircean paper Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man, proposing to extract from the consequences of this analysis the guidelines of a realism that gradually become more radical in Peirce’s mature work. Such consequences will be consolidated in (...) his Phenomenology, a science that will ground Semiotics and a conception of symmetry related to Peirce’s categories. This symmetry regarding his epistemology and ontology will be, by the way, omnipresent in all Peircean philosophical system. The second part of the paper discusses the concepts of mediation and representation, also under a realistic background, concluding that these concepts cannot be coherently interlaced in nominalistic philosophies, in which is often found theoretical consequences somehow committed with dogmatic and no dialogic postures, in the sense of a meaning analysis proposed by the classical Peircean pragmatism. (shrink)

Part of Kant’s legacy to Peirce was a lasting conviction that metaphysics is not irredeemable, but can and should be set “on the secure path of a science”. However, Peirce’s “scientific metaphysics”, unlike Kant’s, uses the method of science, i.e., of experience and reasoning; but requires close attention to experience of the most familiar kind rather than the recherché experience needed by the special sciences. This distinctively plausible reconception of what a genuinely scientific metaphysics would be is part of Peirce’s (...) legacy to philosophy today, enabling us to steer clear of both apriorism and of scientism - the Scylla and Charybdis of recent metaphysics. (shrink)