Peirce on the Medievals: Realism, Power and Form

Abstract

In the first section, I discuss Peirce’s ambivalence attitude towards medieval thinkers – some high praise, some harsh criticism. In the second, I consider three criticisms Max Fisch mde of my book Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism. My book had presented Peirce’s realism as if it were a single position from first to last. And I want to adjust that in the light of Fisch’s points. I now want to distinguish his scholastic realism from his ongoing development of realism. To this end, I offer a more restricted and precise meaning to “scholastic realism” – roughly an anti-platonism in which the common nature is found as an element in things. That meaning does, I think, remain constant for Peirce; though I agree with Fisch that this is only a part of his developing realism. In the third section, I bring out the connection between the scholastic notion of potentiality and Peirce’s “wouldbe’s.” Interestingly enough (to me), this is not an influence that Peirce himself acknowledges. I also point out there that Peirce is rather dismissive of the scholastic notion of form, which he thinks is a perversion of Aristotle’s more useful (if vague) position.