Search Results

This chapter considers one of Peirce's criticisms of Hegel, namely, that Hegel was a nominalist. The nature of this criticism is explored, particularly in the light of another of Peirce's claims about Hegel, viz. that he was overcommitted to what Peirce calls ‘Thirdness’, where it is then prima facie puzzling how Hegel can have both faults, as the latter involves a kind of realism about generality or universals which nominalists characteristically reject. The chapter then considers the justice of Peirce's criticism, where it is argued that the criticism is unwarranted, and that in some respects it is curious to find Peirce making it at all, when he could just as easily have treated Hegel as an ally in his struggle against nominalism.

This chapter concerns Peirce's claim that Hegel neglected to give sufficient weight to what Peirce called ‘Firstness’, by which Peirce meant immediacy or individuality. Peirce's concerns are compared to a worry that surfaces in the German Idealist tradition with the later Schelling, and goes on to play a crucial role in the thought of many of Hegel's subsequent critics, from Kierkegaard to Deleuze: namely, has Hegel succeeded in addressing Jacobi's worry that our relation to the world must involve an immediacy that cannot be grasped in conceptual terms? Where Peirce's position is interesting, however, is that while he wants to do justice to this concern, he also wants to balance it with a commitment to what he calls Thirdness, and thus to mediation and generality, so that (this chapter argues) Peirce's outlook cannot represent a complete break with Hegel (as Peirce himself thought), but may rather provide a model for thinking about what a properly Hegelian treatment of this issue should really be.

This chapter introduces the social representations perspective that forms the background of the entire volume, presenting the social-psychological gaze (regard psychosocial): the acknowledgment that the knowledge of a social object necessarily requires the mediation of an Alter, a “thirdness.” From this premise, specific ways of studying change and continuity in meaning-making derive, putting change at the forefront as well as concerns about the role of the researcher along the path. After considering these features, the chapter briefly presents the various parts that compose the book and the single chapters. From a social representations stance or from cognate perspectives, several keywords and topics are encountered, both on a theoretical side and with empirical examples, addressing social issues in domains such as health, aging, inequalities, environment, and community.

This chapter assesses the odd sound, or sound oddity, of “thirdness”—tercer sonido (third sound). A term that finds its current philosophical footing in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, thirdness designates the substance of mediation. But, less abstractly, thirdness also figures decisively in the discursive field of cinema studies. There it resonates as a form of filmmaking, often tied to Latin America in the 1960s, that designates what falls between the global cinema of Hollywood and the various national cinemas that have risen to challenge its cultural and economic hegemony. Noting that despite the enormous theoretical attention given to the phenomenon of “third cinema,” the soundtracks of tercer cine films have largely lapsed into silence. The chapter explores the deployment of “the third” in the Roberto Esposito's The Third Person and Hélène Cixous's The Third Body to track the work of the audit in people's “deafness” to mediation in the works of cultural revolution.

This chapter focuses on resolving the process versus entity dichotomy centered on the nature of organization. It argues for the priority of transaction as the basis of organization since transactions bind actors by establishing complementary rights and obligations. A transactional view of organization explains the emergence of organization as an entity with the identity of a person, who then is repeatedly reconstructed in the conversations of members, since by authoring the organization they can thereby establish their own authority as its agents, translators and representatives. The chapter is built around a re-examination of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and an illustration drawn from the empirical literature to illustrate how organization emerges in the communicative practices of its members.

This chapter begins by outlining some common properties of channels, infrastructure, and institutions. It connects and critiques the assumptions and interventions of three influential intellectual traditions: cybernetics (via Claude Shannon), linguistics and anthropology (via Roman Jakobson), and actor-network theory (via Michel Serres). By developing the relation between Serres’s notion of the parasite and Peirce’s notion of thirdness, it theorizes the role of those creatures who live in and off infrastructure: not just enemies, parasites, and noise, but also pirates, trolls, and internet service providers. And by extending Jakobson’s account of duplex categories (shifters, proper names, meta-language, reported speech) from codes to channels, it theorizes four reflexive modes of circulation any network may involve: self-channeling channels, source-dependent channels, signer-directed signers, and channel-directed signers. The conclusion returns to the notion of enclosure, showing the ways that networks are simultaneously a condition for, and a target of, knowledge, power, and profit.

Peirce’s reduction thesis—that the basic forms of propositions are three and only three, named firstness, secondness, and thirdness—is a point of scholarly contention, but it is also at the root of Peirce’s phenomenology. Peirce came to this thesis through his formal logical notation, the Existential Graphs. Peirce maintains that all n-adic propositional forms where n > 3 can be constructed from triadic propositional forms. All n-adic propositional forms where n > 3 can be decomposted into triadic propositional forms. Moreover, triadic propositional forms cannot be constructed from dyadic propositional forms, and dyadic propositional forms cannot be constructed from monadic propositional forms. Finally, all triadic propositional forms contain as abstractical logical ingredients dyadic and monadic propositional forms. These four theses, elucidated by his work in graphical logic, entail his reduction thesis.

Peirce distinguishes between two sets of phenomenological categories, the formal quantitative categories and the material qualitative categories. The former are isolated by direct attentional inspective analysis wherein the formal and logical categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness are employed as heuristics. The formal quantitative phenomenological categories are quality, brute reaction, and representation, and they are also evident in temporality as presentness, pastness, and futurity and in modality as possibility, actuality, and necessity. The material qualitative categories are positiveness and negativeness and are correlated with the extremes of a continuum. I first provide an overview of the categories and then I chronologically present the developments in Peirce’s thinking about these categories.

This introduction introduces the nested continua model and the philosophical and logical resources that guide its use. The resources stem overwhelmingly from the American pragmatist (and pragmaticist) philosopher C. S. Peirce, and so considerable effort is also devoted to articulating the aspects of Peirce’s life and thought that most inform the work. These include the Existential Graphs, the three categories, and the metaphysics of continuity. The contemporary theological context in the form of Robert C. Neville and Peter Ochs is also introduced. The model is also placed within broader academic and cultural context: (1) the three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness; (2) the metaphysics of synechism or continuity; and (3) Robert C. Neville’s axiology of thinking and Peter Ochs’s Scriptural Reasoning.

This chapter identifies and examines those areas of Peirce’s thought that most inform the nested continua model. The first of these are the Existential Graphs, whose demonstrations of iconic logic provide the model with its basic self-understanding, yet whose rules of logical operation are very different. Subsequently, the categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness are examined; these are treated developmentally with respect to some of their most significant modifications over the course of Peirce’s life, as well as the indispensible function they perform in terms of interpreting the metaphysical implications of the model, particularly in relation to synechism. Following this, such innovations in Peirce’s work as his logic of abduction, prescision, and vagueness/generality are understood in terms of nested continua’s logical and hermeneutic operations. Similar treatment is given for Peirce’s writings on habit, continua, and infinitesimals, drawing primarily from Peirce’s Monist series of 1891–3.

This chapter shows how Robert C. Neville’s metaphysics of time and eternity may be applied to nested continua, as well as its context in relation to the metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead. The chapter also examines Sandra B. Rosenthal’s description of Neville’s work as process-oriented at the expense of his pragmatism before arguing that Neville nonetheless offers a theological vision that is congenial to the “emergent-continuity-within” implications of Peirce’s synechism. After introducing significant aspects of Neville’s career context, the chapter explores in some detail the inheritance of Whitehead in Neville’s work. Discussion then moves toward the possibility of developing a Peircean metaphysics of time that accords with Neville’s commitments to metaphysics, realism, and pluralism. In such discussions, the book provides its first descriptions of the distinction between time-as-experienced and time-as-object-of-inquiry, as well as between absolute Firstness and absolute Thirdness.

This chapter explores the constructive theology warranted by the model. It includes the caveats that come with applying Peirce’s three categories theologically—particularly the sense in which deduction is an inappropriate means of speculating upon such traditional divine attributes as freedom and supremacy—as well as the different modes of experiencing and discussing the divine. These include understanding God in terms of absolute Thirdness as immanent source of intelligibility and ultimate judgment; and absolute Firstness as creator ex nihilo and source of chance and novelty, as well as love, change, and normativity as some of the means by which the divine is experienced in daily life. Analysis then turns toward the problem of evil. Disinctions between “accidental” and “singular” evil are discussed, as well as those between “opaque” and “translucent” circles of interpretation.