Peirce and Spinoza´s Pragmaticist Methapysics

Abstract

In the early 20th century, moved by James’s popularization of pragmatism and by the so-called “Battle of the Absolute” that divided American philosophers in the period, Peirce sought to communicate his own pragmaticism both directly via repeated attempts to formulate the doctrine and indirectly by comparing his thought to that of such philosophical for ebears as Spinoza, Berkeley and Kant. Peirce’s debt to Berkeley and Kant are well-documented. However, insufficient attention has been paid to his invocations of Spinoza. In this paper, I survey Peirce’s discussions ofSpinoza, and identify a shift in his account of Spinoza. Specifically, in 1904 he comes to regard Spinoza as an important early pragmaticist. I argue that this shift corresponds with Peirce’s own late efforts to distinguish his pragmaticism from the pragmatism of such figures as James and Schiller.While both pragmatism and pragmaticism take as their starting point some version of the pragmatic maxim, the latter is distinctive for retaining a realist metaphysics. I argue that, on Peirce’s view, an early version of the pragmatic maxim, evidence of critical common sensism and a weak scholastic realism are all evident in Spinoza’s thought.