‘On Pierce’ by Cornelis de Waal is a very short most plain introduction to philosophy and thought of Charles Sanders Pierce. This book explains from basic structure and definitions of Pierce’s philosophy and science, through his thinking about pragmatism, evolution and religion, to his semiotics and semiotic thought of man. The commentaries includes influences and differences of Pierce’s philosophy with Aristotle, Duns Scotus, British empiricism (John Locke, David Hume and George Barkley), Immanuel Kant, American pragmatism (William James and John Dewey) and Ferdinand de Saussure. More than half of description of this book is an explanation of basis, method and systems of Pierce’s entire philosophy and total science. Last two chapters are a commentary of Pierce’s semiotics and its view, are concise and very clear.
I want to quote description of chapter 10 in this book below, it’s great summary of Pierce’s philosophy and semiotic thought. ‘As we saw with his evolutional cosmology, for Pierce the whole universe is evolving mind; more specifically, the universe consists of mind that is increasingly bound by habit. Hence, the self too is mind bound by habit, just as everything else is. What distinguishes the self from material objects, including the human body, are the specific habits by which it is bound and the degree into which it has retained spontaneity. Recall that within Pierce’s evolutionary cosmology everything emerged out of a state of pure spontaneity through a process of habit formation.’
On Pierce (Wadsworth Philosophy Series)
Cornelis de Waal
Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Belmont, December 22 2000
96 pages $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-534-58376-7
Contents:
Preface
1. Who’s Charles Pierce
2. A New List of Categories
3. Phenomenology and the Normative Science
4. Pragmatism
5. The Scientific Method
6. Scientific Metaphysics
7. Evolutionary Cosmology
8. Philosophy of Religion
9. Semeiotic
10. A Semeiotic Theory of Man
Suggestions for Further Reading
Notes