A reader who is not disposed to work upon logic as slowly, as minutely, as laboriously as he would upon any other subject whatever--at the very least--simply will have to go without learning much about the theory of reasoning from any source.

Broad generalization is glorious when it is the inevitable outpressed juice of painfully matured little details of knowledge; but when it is not that, it is a crude spirit inciting only broils between a hundred little dogmas,each most justly condemning all the others. It is the usual fruit of sloth.

A single contrary fact, honestly recorded, is worth more than a season of agreeable ones. - original aphorism

Pragmatists ask the practical question: are our ways of describing things, or relating them to other things so as to cope with them better by making them fulfill our needs more adequately, as good as possible? Or can we do better? PasAA p.127 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

Pragmatists insist that we can only talk about things under more or less optional descriptions of them, descriptions dictated by our own human needs, and that this is not a spiritual or epistemological disaster. PasAA p.127 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

Thoughts? #philosophy

Do not block the way of inquiry.

This is, at most, to say that it has to call in the aid of mathematics, that it has a mathematical branch. But so much may be said of every science.

True, it is not merely, or even mainly, a mere discovery of what really is, like metaphysics. It is a normative science. It thus has a strongly mathematical character, at least in its methodeutic division; for here it analyzes the problem of how, with given means, a required end is to be pursued.

But, indeed, the difference between the two sciences is far more than that between two points of view. Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions. Logic, on the contrary, is categorical in its assertions.

Thoughts? #philosophy

By thinking of everything as relational through and through, pragmatists attempt to get rid of the contrast between reality and appearance. PasAA p.127 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

I am confident I detect something of this even in the majority of those young men who become known to me as only having paid particular attention to philosophy in the universities; although there are some whose logical instincts have been too robust to be so easily debilitated.

The effect upon the minds of those who have been nourished on such food mainly, becomes deplorably patent to everybody who finds himself in contact with them. Their natural sense of logic is enfeebled and diseased.

The metaphysics of our best contemporaries lacks but little of the rank of a science; but logical criticism has also grown more searching, and you may search the whole library of modern metaphysics from Descartes to the most accurate metaphysical reasoners of today /1

Logic and metaphysics were studied with a considerable degree of minuteness and accuracy; so that, in spite of a barbaric civilization and other unfavorable influences, sufficiently obvious, they reached an excellence which our own generation has not been able to appreciate.

In the northern Europe of the scholastic ages, the nullity of physics was due to a different cause, explicitly set forth by Roger Bacon.

I have also portrayed pragmatism as a generalized form of antiessentialism—as an attempt to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic features of things. PasAA p.127 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Antiessentialism

John Banville wrote a lovely review of my biography of Bergson for @thenation.com calling it “fascinating and lively” He also says that I have “a genius for condensing complex philosophical and scientific postulates into digestible bites.” www.thenation.com/article/cult...

Born Hegelian sensualists, they could not divest themselves of their belief that no worse way of getting at any comprehension of a flower could be devised than beginning by picking it to pieces, and so spoiling the flower. What was the result?

The Greek philosophers could not be persuaded that minute analysis was proper in physical science.

Adaptation is not a virtue. It is a verdict, delivered slowly, by an environment that does not explain itself. - original aphorism

The one primary and fundamental law of mental action consists in a tendency to generalisation.

But to reunite, like mathematics, perfect exactitude, and practical infallibility, with unrestricted universality is remarkable. But it is not hard to see that all these characters of mathematics are inevitable consequences of its being the study of hypothetical truth.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic. - Autobiography

Consider a gob of protoplasm, say an amoeba or a slime-mould... There is no doubt that this slime-mould, or this amoeba, or at any rate some similar mass of protoplasm, feels.

Now, to say that a lot of objects is finite, is the same as to say that if we pass through the class from one to another we shall necessarily come round to one of those individuals already passed; that is, if every one of the lot is in any one-to-one relation to one of the lot, /1

But since the relation of the theory of logic to conceivable applications of it will, by and by, come up for closer examination, we need not now consider it further.

It would be easy enough--much too easy--to marshal a goodly squadron of treatises on logic, each of them swelled out with matter foreign to any conceivable applicability until, like a corpulent man, it can no longer see on what it is standing, /1

If the sign were not related to its object except by the mind thinking of them separately, it would not fulfil the function of a sign at all.

Thus, rather than suppose that parallel lines, unlike all other pairs of straight lines in a plane, never meet, he supposes that they intersect at infinity.

Hence it is that a mathematician often finds what a chess-player might call a gambit to his advantage; exchanging a smaller problem that involves exceptions for a larger one free from them.

I take Nagel to be the clearest-headed and most consistent opponent of pragmatism, pan-relationalism, and every other view I hold dear on the contemporary philosophical scene. PasAA p.112 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Nagel

The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

Maxwell’s notion of a tension exercized upon lines of electrical force, transverse to them, is somewhat similar.

So likewise, when the analyst treats operations as themselves subjects of operations, a method whose utility will not be denied, this is another instance of abstraction.

Again, a point moves: it is by abstraction that the geometer says that it “describes a line.” This line, though an abstraction, itself moves; and this is regarded as generating a surface; and so on.

Every time I think of Peirce I am amazed that he isn’t discussed as often, or more so than the likes of Aristotle, Kant, et al.

The naturalist who has not been wrong in writing has not yet written anything important. - original aphorism

But by "semiosis" I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.

You are of all my friends the one who illustrates pragmatism in its most needful forms. You are a jewel of pragmatism. —Letter to William James

The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.

I have selected sweetness as an instance of one of the least useful of abstractions. Yet even this is convenient. It facilitates such thoughts as that the sweetness of honey is particularly cloying; that the sweetness of honey is something like the sweetness of a honeymoon; etc.

The only profession made is that we can consider the fact of honey being sweet under the form of a relation; and so we really can.

‘Sweetness’ might be called a fictitious thing, in one sense. But since the mode of being attributed to it consists in no more than the fact that some things are sweet, and it is not pretended, or even imagined, that it has any other mode of being, there is, after all, no fiction.

Thus, we transform the proposition, ‘Honey is sweet’ into ‘honey possesses sweetness’.

Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already. But I observe that this satisfaction is limited to one's own ratiocination and does not extend to that of other men.

When the data surprises you, do not smooth it. Follow it. That is where the real discoveries live.

“Mathematics is the science which draws necessary conclusions.” —Benjamin Peirce