Abstract

In this contribution I present Charles S. Peirce as an author deeply immersed in the scientific debates of his time, with a synthetic mind that makes him a forerunner todays’ far from equilibrium self-organization and an advocate of an “expanded evolutionary synthesis” that takes into account elements from diverse branches of biology and also from physics. That should not be a surprise as it is examined the influences that Lamarc-kian and Darwinian evolutionary theories, and Boltzmann and Maxwell s mechanical statistical theories, exerted on Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics. Along these lines I show how the Lamarckian notion of habit, understood as the mediatory factor between organisms’ perturbations provoked by external circumstances and heritable morpholo-gical variations, through its generalization contributed to the formulation of thirdness category, while the Darwinian triad variation, heredity and selection, was understood as an specification of Peircean categories firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Furthermore I show Boltzmann s influence on the acceptance of ontological chance that Peirce included into the category of firstness and the ensuing idea of an arrow of irreversible and conti-nuous time, associated with thirdness. I discuss one of the reasons that moved Peirce to propose ad hoc the “law of mind” in order to save the creative and irreversible time arrow that was questioned by Poincare’s cyclic recurrence in an ergodic universe. Thus, in the context of XIXth century science, it was correct to postulate the “law of mind” in order to save the idea of evolution as a convincing and irrefutable argument against mechanistic hegemonic interpretations of nature that could not account for: a) the determination of initial conditions, b) the emergence of behaviors oriented to specific goals, and c) evolutionary bifurcations generated out of unpredictable choices. Maxwell s influence on Peirce is notorious in his accounts of ordering anti-entropic effects, temporal contin-gencies, bifurcations at unstable critical points and arguments against the ergodicity of the universe. To conclude I present a consideration over Peirce’s “agapastic” evolution, where “individual elections”, habit and intelligence promote cooperation, reciprocity, mutualistic and symbiotic associations that thus contribute to the increment of the crea-tive potential of nature.

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