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

Abstract

This is the first of two papers that examine Charles Peirce’s denial that human beings have a faculty of intuition. The semiotic and epistemological aspects of that denial are well-know. My focus is on its neglected metaphysical aspect, which I argue 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 second paper, I will argue that the “objective idealism” of Peirce’s 1890s cosmological series is a more general iteration of the metaphysical aspect of his earlier denial of intuition.