Peirce's empiricism : its roots and its originality / Aaron Bruce Wilson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wilson, Aaron Bruce, author.

Series:

American philosophy series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914.

Peirce, Charles S.

Empiricism.

Physical Description:

xiii, 343 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2016]

Summary:

Widely praised as a founder of modern semiotics and of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) spent over forty years developing a philosophical system that addresses the fundamental problems of Western metaphysics, epistemology and value theory. Although never formally completed, what emerges from Peirce's writings is a distinctive system that, through an innovative semiotic or theory of signs and cognition, combine's a thorougoing form of empiricism with a robustly realist metaphysics that emphasizes the mind-independence of laws and other universals. Peirce's Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality explains this marriage of empiricism with realism by tracing the roots of Peirce's thought in the history of Western philosophy, with particular attention paid to his predecessors in the empiricist and the commonsense traditions. By purging modern empiricism of its nominalistic metaphysics and its Cartesian, assumptions about mind and knowledge, and by combining it with insights from sources as diverse as Duns Scotus and Charles Darwin, Peirce reinvents the idea that all our knowledge depends on sense perception while reaffirming the place of philosophy as a foundational field of inquiry. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Empiricism-History and Analysis 15

2 Empiricism without Nominalism 43

3 Cartesianism and the Rise of Modern Empiricism 73

4 The Associationist Step Toward Pragmatism 113

5 The Reidian Strand: Common Sense and Perception 157

6 Peirce's Account of Perception 187

7 Semeiosis, Truth, and Inquiry 235

8 Empiricism and Philosophical Inquiry 281.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781498510233

149851023X

OCLC:

957133885