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[Fall 2022] Semiotics: Peirce and the Modern Spirit

“The last of the moderns,” writes John Deely of Charles Sanders Peirce, “and the first of the postmoderns.” Why this switch, this flip, between modernity and postmodernity? The question of postmodernity’s meaning and definition is altogether another issue: but one which we can understand only inasmuch as we first understand rightly what modernity is, or was. As Deely goes on:

View the syllabus!

Charles Sanders Peirce (1389–1914) was the man who fully introduced into the great conversation of philosophy the unconsidered assumption which had made the way of ideas seem viable to the moderns, the assumption, to wit, that the direct objects of experience are wholly produced by the mind itself. In philosophy, he was raised on The Critique of Pure Reason. He claimed to know it by heart. When he said “No!” to Kant, it meant something.

Now why did he say no?

John Deely 2001: Four Ages of Understanding, 611-12.

The answer to this question—why did Peirce say “no” to Immanuel Kant—as Kirk Kanzelberger will show us in this seminar, is the answer “no” to all modern philosophy. To demonstrate this severe criticism, we will read across a selection of texts from Peirce’s career, spanning from 1868–1908 (all available in the two volumes of the Essential Peirce: Volume I, Volume II, which are inexpensive in paperback and very inexpensive in Kindle formats). These readings will demonstrate an insight into Peirce’s own theory of cognition, in stark contrast to that held by the moderns, as well as his insight into the coherence of this thinking with the universe at large.

Discussion Sessions
10:00am ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings

September
24
Week 1: Introduction
Lecture: “Descartes and the Modern Spirit”
Required Readings:
» Renee Descartes, Discourse on Method (selection)
» Renee Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (selection)
» Walker Percy, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind”

Recommended Listening:
» Kanzelberger, K., “Mending the Cartesian Rift: Walker Percy on Being Human” (2020 Lyceum Institute Colloquium lecture audio recording)
October
1
Week 2: “All Thought is in Signs”
Lecture: From Intuitionism to Semiosis
Required Readings:
» Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man (EP vol. 1, item 2)
» Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (EP vol. 1, item 2) (selections TBD)
October
8
Week 3: “Beliefs… Caused by Nothing Human”
Lecture:  From Rationalism to the Pragmatic Maxim
Required Readings:
» The Fixation of Belief (EP vol. 1, item 7)
» How to Make Our Ideas Clear (EP vol. 1, item 8)
October
15
Week 4: “Tychism”
Lecture: Guessing the Riddle (Part I)
Required Readings:
» The Architecture of Theories (EP vol. 1, item 21)
» The Doctrine of Necessity Examined (EP vol. 1, item 22)
Optional Reading:
» “A Reply to the Necessitarians” (Collected Papers, vol. 6, 588-618)
October
22

BREAK
October
29
Week 5: “Synechism; Agapism”
Lecture: Guessing the Riddle (Part II)
Required Readings:
» The Law of Mind (EP vol. 1, item 23)
» Man’s Glassy Essence (EP vol. 1, item 24)
» Evolutionary Love (EP vol. 1, item 25)
November
5
Week 6: “If There is Any Goddess of Nonsense, This Must Be Her Haunt”
Lecture: Peirce on the Denial of Final Causality
Required Readings:
» On Science and Natural Classes (EP vol. 2, item 9)
November
12
Week 7: “Signs and States of Mind”
Lecture: The Science of Signs (Part I)
Required Readings:
» What Is a Sign? (EP vol. 2, item 2)
» Of Reasoning in General (EP vol. 2, item 3)
November
19
 Week 8: “Signs and the Three Universal Categories”
Lecture: The Science of Signs (Part II)
Required Readings:
» Sundry Logical Conceptions (EP vol. 2, item 20)
» Excerpts from Letters to William James (EP vol. 2, item 33)

This seminar is open to all participants, regardless of prior experience. View the syllabus here and learn more about Lyceum Institute seminars here.

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

One payment covers all 8 weeks.

Registration is closed.

[Fall 2022] The Faults of Modern Philosophy

This is not a seminar about modernity, but about modern philosophy—and, specifically, about the fundamental flaws (or faults) which characterize modern philosophy’s thinking.  These flaws, once recognized, show their effects everywhere today: in the endless fragmentation of world, mind, self; in the intransigence of political discourse, the widening cultural divides, the polarization of extremes, and the frail, shrill assertions of expertise, exactitude, and a scientific consensus that appears to hold naught together in truth but the adherents of a narrow ideology.

We will not, in the course of these eight weeks, undertake deconstruction of this fragile and threatening edifice.  Rather, our task is to discover and analyze the underlying faults.  We will accomplish this analysis through a collective effort—with lectures given and discussions led by three faculty (Kemple, Wagner, and Boyer)—that unveils the fundamental mistakes of modern philosophy’s key thinkers.  Though these thinkers are diverse from one another, commonly they are “modern” in holding certain presuppositions about the nature of knowledge and the human person resulting in a discontinuous set of fundamental beliefs concerning the universe and our experience of it.

It would be easy simply to point to the precarity and chaos permeating the world built on such foundations, wave it away, and say that we must begin again.  But such hand-waving not only fails to be efficacious, it is, moreover, delusional.  We are the children of modernity, like it or not, and their errors are our inheritance, abusive though that may be.  If we fail to understand the foundations of the moderns’ thoughts, we will not recognize their influence in ourselves.

Discussion Sessions
2:00pm ET

(World times)
Study Topics &
Readings

September
24
Week 1: The Modern Context
Lecture: From the Break with Scholasticism to the Incoherence of Today
Readings:
» Selections from preparatory bibliography.
October
1
Week 2: The False Ground of Modern Philosophy
Lecture: The πρῶτον ψεῦδος [first falsehood] of Modern Philosophy: Descartes’ Method
Reading:
» Descartes, Meditations (I-II).
October
8
Week 3: Common Idealism
Lecture: The Lonely Way of Ideas
Reading:
» Descartes, Discourse on Method (selections).
» Descartes, Meditations (III).
» Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (selections).
October
15
Week 4: A Broken “Empiricism”
Lecture: David Hume’s “Empirical” Method: The Tale of Naïve Cartesian
Reading:
» Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (selections).
» Aristotle, Physics (selections).
October
22

BREAK
October
29
Week 5: Immanuel Kant and the Unknowable
Lecture: Kant’s A Priori Prison
Reading:
» Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (selections).
» Gilson, Unity of Philosophical Experience (selections).
November
5
Week 6: Pointing Games
Lecture: Wittgenstein’s Language
Reading:
» Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (selections).
November
12
Week 7: Avoiding Reality
Lecture: Choose Your Own Ontology
Readings:
» Quine, “On What There Is”.
» Geach, “Symposium: On What There Is”
November
19
Week 8: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Nadir of Modernity
Lecture: Antagonism of Person and Nature
Readings
» Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism.

This seminar is open to all participants, regardless of prior experience. View the syllabus here and learn more about Lyceum Institute seminars here.

Lyceum Institute seminar costs are structured on a principle of financial subsidiarity. There are three payment levels, priced according to likely levels of income. If you wish to take a seminar but cannot afford the suggested rate, it is acceptable to sign up at a less-expensive level. The idea is: pay what you can. Those who can pay more, should, so that those who cannot pay as much, need not. Lyceum Institute members receive a further discount (see here for details).

One payment covers all 8 weeks.

Registration is closed.