Continuity and Inheritance: Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Work of C.S. Peirce

Abstract

/. Revisiting Peirce3 s Kantian Inheritance When I a babe in philosophy, Charles Peirce wrote, my bottle filled from the udders of Kant.1 It is widely recognized that this early form of philosophic nourishment granted young Peirce the opportunity to recognize the respective shortcomings of empiricism and idealism and provided the point of departure for his philosophic architectonic. Peirce himself comments on this indebtedness to Immanuel Kant at multiple points, especially in the early stages of his work. In reference to his categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, Peirce writes that the list grew originally out of the study of the table of Kant.2 This table, found in the beginning of the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason is crucial in Peirce's thinking, for it stands as Kant's attempt to bring analytic unity to the manifold of representations in judgment and supplies the necessary triadic structure that characterizes Peirce's system. The community of Peirce scholars today seems to acknowledge the contribution Kant made to the development of American pragmatism3 and, more particularly, Peirce's pragmaticism. This acknowledgement, however, has been somewhat cursory, and often serves as a mere preparatory move in highlighting the way in which Peirce overcomes and abandons the Kantian project as framed in the First Critique. According to Karl-Otto Apel, Andre De Tienne4 and Sandra Rosenthal,5 Peirce grows up, and weans himself from Kant's formal theory of cognition. The commentators' perspective on the relation between Peirce and Kant is understandable; despite his praise for the king of modern philosophy, Peirce regards Kant's work as antiquated and underscores the way in which the Critique of Pure Reason stands apart from a more organic, active, and pragmatic reading of ontology and epistemology. Peirce writes that he was a pure Kantist until he forced by successive steps into pragmaticism.6 My intent is not to reemphasize the arguments posed by Peirce against his philosophic forefather, but rather to suggest a type of response to these criticisms a response made on Kant's own terms. I will not attempt to