The Final Incapacity: Peirce on Intuition and the Continuity of Mind and Matter (Part 2)

Abstract

This is the second of two papers that examine Charles Peirce's denial that human beings have a faculty of intuition. In the first paper, I argued that in its metaphysical aspect, Peirce's denial of intuition amounts to the doctrine that there is no determinate boundary between the internal world of the cognizing subject and the external world that the subject cognizes. In the present paper, I argue that, properly understood, the "objective idealism" of Peirce's 1890s cosmological series is a more general iteration of the metaphysical aspect of his earlier denial of intuition. I also consider whether Peirce continued to deny that there is a definite boundary between the internal and external worlds in the years after the cosmological series.