Peirce on god, reality and personality

Abstract

The first generation of Peirce scholars generally considered his cosmological writings something of an irrelevant embarrassment. Recent commentators have realized that Peirce the tough-minded logician and philosopher of science must somehow be reconciled with Peirce the tender-minded defender of a metaphysics of evolutionary love. This paper will explain how one of the earliest proponents of a broadly verificationist approach to meaning could also defend a conception of the universe as growing toward concrete reasonableness through being loved. Verificationism and cosmology come intriguingly together in Peirce’s denial that unknowable realities can exist and his concomitant insistence that reality is thought-like. Special attention will be paid to this anti-nominalist theory of reality and to one of its consequences, viz. That a person is of the nature of a sign. Peirce’s argument that God is real and personal thus deploys distinctive, valuable and challenging conceptions of reality and personality.