/lit/ - Literature

>>22450498
>I need something that satisfyingly explains why things are one way and not another, qualitative-wise, and in terms of arrangement, to my senses.
I've been screaming at people to read Peirce for exactly this reason.
>>22450511
Yes. When I was grappling with the problem of duality and twoness, I had Aristotle's critique in mind, which was that you couldn't abstract "two" separate from "two things." But then I thought about Aristotle's emphasis on individuals in his own metaphysics, and I realized something important. In order to count "two things", you have to impose a uniform standard of "thisness" on both things. Otherwise, they would be one object A and one object B instead of two object As. Now, we have to go back to the generation of numbers to understand the implications. First, we began with One, and then we recognize an internal contradiction in One, in which we have a pair of concepts, One and Being. Since these concepts "emerge" out of difference in internal contradiction, the pair has to come "before" twoness. Only in reconciling the two concepts in their being can twoness emerge from the pair.

I feel like I have to put scare quotes around "emerge" and "before" because I don't think of this as an evolution in time but rather a logical procession that is also eternal due to the nature of the concepts involved. In some sense, I think that One, Being, and Difference have to all be there as a "tripod", as they're all dependent on each other.

I haven't gotten to the Sophist yet, unfortunately. I like to marinate in what I'm interested in before I move on.

>>22425961
Shit, I forgot another KEY KEY KEY idea:
>prescision (goes hand-in-hand with the categories and hypostatic abstraction)

In addition, if you REALLY want to do a deep dive, then I highly recommend that:
1) You are familiar with Plato, especially when it comes to his later writings (e.g. Parmenides, Philebus, Statesmen, the Sophist) dealing with the generation of numbers, the Great and the Small, the Measure and the Mean, and the method of division (diaeresis).
2) You are well-acquainted with the corpus of Aristotle, especially the Organon and Metaphysics, having done some thought in trying to "unify" them together. If you can speak intelligently about whether the Categories are linguistic or ontological, I think you're in good hands.
3) You are well-acquainted with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, especially with the nitty-gritty, "mechanical" sections like the Table of Judgments and the Table of Categories. You don't need to read the Critique of Judgment, since Peirce apparently never read it, but you'll see that it ends up seguing well with some of Peirce's independent thoughts on aesthetics thanks to influence of Schiller's "play drive" on young Peirce.
4) You are somewhat familiar with the "best hits" of Scholastic philosophy, namely Aquinas, Scotus, and Suarez. If you understand terms like entia res, entia rationis, first intentions, second intentions, etc., and you're familiar with the problem of universals, then I'd say you have enough of a background.
This background knowledge will take you right into Peirce's intellectual neighborhood.

Finally, I highly recommend that you're familiar with the basics of grammar, linguistics, and modern formal logic, as it will help you process what Peirce is trying to do, which is to perform philosophy in such a way where it explains how "everything", in a broad sense, "hangs together", in a broad sense. A little preparatory work here goes a long way, since it'll give you the tools to view the categories, the reduction thesis, and hypostatic abstraction in a way that will make it seem like a logical analysis and not a weird, if not surprisingly apt, mystical system. You'll also be able to parse what Peirce is doing with his "logic of relatives" and especially his idiosyncratic but brilliant "existential graphs", which are quite fascinating and might teach you things about logic you never fully recognized.

At some point in the future, I might compile a list of secondary sources that I felt are worth their bang for their buck in understanding what Peirce is doing. But for now, that Philosign video, although extremely basic, is a good start. Best of luck in studying Peirce, who I believe is by far the best philosopher America has produced and easily one of the best philosophers the modern west has ever produced. It'll give you a second license on philosophy that you didn't think was possible.
(2/2)

>>20950180
I also think that Peirce has some kind of "indeterminate dyad"-like movement going through his triads, when things move from firstness to thirdness, or from thirdness to firstness (and not in the sense of beginning a new cycle but rather oscillating backwards). Pic-related might be informative, but ultimately a mistaken, analogy. This video's distinction between the "factual dependency" and the "logical dependency" of Peirce's categories illustrates it well: notice the directionality involved.
>https://youtu.be/YNPVefLzJqU?t=614

>>20845151
It seems like all three happens at once, doesn't it? I've been reading a ton of Peirce, whose phenomenology, built on an architectonic system is incredibly fascinating. What I just described was a fractal triad of firstness, secondness, thirdness, all of which occur at once but still require an order. 3) is last because that is the habit-building process. And you can't gather before you choose. That would essentially imply that life can be a spectator sport. But they all happen at once, are dependent on each other, and build on each other.

So, the reason why I bring up Peirce is because he takes the work of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel on conceptual categories to their extreme. He does more collecting of categories than Aristotle. He does more organizing of categories and skepticism of sensible intuitions than Kant (space and time may not be fully formed either). And he does more application of logic to the phenomena, continuity of process, and importance of community than Hegel. Towards the end of his life, Peirce begins to acceed to Plato and Schelling's influence, which slowly creeps in his work.

Quick detour, this is also why I was interested in Steiner, because he basically takes Hegel's spin on Kant with the categories but applies it to the supersensible reality, beyond the phenomena.

Unfortunately, Peirce eventually acknowledges that all this means is that he's the ur-Kant. Bad infinities galore everywhere. Peirce's system made him open to inquiry, but it also made all progress seem capable of imploding on a whim. Laws of nature we observe could, theoretically, be disproved at any time. All we have is the possibility of infinite exploration of the phenomena. The only thing saving him is the presence of what he referenced as Galileo's il lume naturale, what I might hazard to call the intellectual intuition, the ability to understand something at all.

>>20827496
In the words of the wise Charles Sanders Peirce, you are denying the aspect of firstness while privileging the aspect of thirdness in your account of phenomenology. You have an incomplete and thus an incoherent account of temporal reality. I'm not a presentist, I'm just somebody who understands that you can't have a continuum without the infinitesimal points. Even Peirce admits that firstness, the aspect of phenomenology in which the suchness of qualia emerges, is ultimately indescribable but is necessarily true for there to be a secondness (reaction) and ultimately a thirdness (habit, continuum, meaning, etc.).