Peirce’s inheritance of Schelling’s progressive metaphysical empiricism

Abstract

The career-texts of Kant, Schelling, and Peirce unfolded in historical sequence to form a paradigm progression in philosophical modernity. To wit, Kant’s third Critique’s reflective synthesis of foundational concepts of nature and freedom opened a speculative path for a landmark line of development in Schelling’s later-phase metaphysical empiricism which, in turn, conveyed a decisive provenance for Peirce’s articulation of indecomposable categories of epistemology, cosmology, and ontological semeiosis. Peirce’s categoriology reconfigured certain theoretical implications of Schelling’s Investigation into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) and The Grounding of the Positive Philosophy(1841) in his later-phase trajectory of postulating an energetic reasonableness in the nature of things.