It May Be a Peg, but Whether It's Square or Round Makes a Difference!

My early morning mind took issue today with comparisons of Plato and Peirce. Yes, it is true that I recognize Peirce as an 'Ancient Ionian-like natural philosopher'. His kindredness with Epicurus, and many other apsects of his thought that I see pointing to that 'excellence of thought era', prompts me to look at his thinking in regard to the changes in Plato as he grew and developed in Athens. Although he was a student of Socrates, the differences in the mature Plato are quite clearly tainted by Athenian life. Peirce also recognized this. ..... Here is an excerpt from a paper delving into this topic. I have issues with it. I will leave it to you to see what you think. It seems like a clear stretch to me, and the more that others have gone down that path of thinking, the more difficult it is to get them to rethink their position (as in 'way leads on to way' in episode 2 of Mapping the Medium). First, the link to the paper... https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/aboutcsp/o'hara/csp-plato.htm ........ And here is the excerpt......... "Besides the previously mentioned wealth of unpublished MSS on Plato and the “Logic of History”, Plato figures prominently in several of the later Peirce's published works. Among these are the 1898 Cambridge Conference papers, notably “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life”, (where he refers to Plato so often he feels compelled to apologize for doing so); the 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism[21] (where Aristotle is identified as a sort of Platonist); and, arguably, still resonate in the 1908 “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (where Plato and the Ideas are mentioned explicitly and favorably in the introduction). The conclusion to “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life” provides an excellent example of the depth of the Platonic influence on Peirce in this period: If you enjoy the good fortune of talking with a number of mathematicians of a high order, you will discover that the typical pure Mathematician is a sort of Platonist….The soul's deeper parts can only be reached through its surface. In this way the eternal forms, that mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us acquainted with, will by slow percolation gradually reach the very core of one's being; and they will come to influence our lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths of merely vital importance, but because they are ideal and eternal verities. (EP2:40-41) This is, for Peirce, a new picture of Platonism. Earlier in the lecture, Peirce explains that he has recently come to understand something about Plato that Plato himself never seems to have fully recognized, namely that Plato is a philosopher of three, not two categories, and that he is a philosopher of continuity. Peirce's researches into the dating of the dialogues serve the purpose of placing the Sophist at the end of Plato's career, allowing the later theory of the forms as continuities (i.e. as thirds rather than as transcendent seconds) to be the fruit of a life of research. Against the prevailing notion of laws of nature as invariable and inviolable fixities Peirce contrasts this Platonic notion of real generalities that are synechistic. Such generals have inherently the possibility of growth, at least in terms of their getting represented in a variety of ways. Peirce writes elsewhere in “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life” that The really continuous things, Space and Time, and Law, are eternal. The dialogue of the Sophistes, lately shown to belong to Plato's last period—when he had, Aristotle tells us, abandoned Ideas and put Numbers in place of them—this dialogue, I say, gives reasons for abandoning the Theory of Ideas which imply that Plato himself had come to see, if not that the Eternal Essences are continuous, at least, that there is an order of affinity among them, such as there is among Numbers. Thus, at last, the Platonic Ideas became Mathematical Essences, not possessed of Actual Existence but only of a Potential Being quite as Real, and his maturest philosophy became welded into mathematics. (EP2:35.) The evolution of Plato's thought thus appears to correspond to the evolution of Peirce's thought. The re-evaluation by Plato of his Theory of Forms closely parallels the re-evaluation of the notion of “natural law” that Peirce is calling for. Both the Forms and natural laws have been thought incorrectly either as mere names or as unchanging existences. Peirce connects Number with Law, and calls Law a continuity. Natural laws then, like the later Forms, are to be re-thought as continua with infinite possibility of getting represented in the world, and the job of science is not to presuppose laws, but to “begin to discern…one great cosmos of forms, a world of potential being,” one “for which the real world affords no parallel.”[22] Elsewhere he writes that “the evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed.”[23" .............. Yes, there is way too much to say to fit it into this blog post today! My schedule only permits me to address these things in time, but dialogue is an excellent way to approach these discrepancies. Don't forget to consider this writing of Peirce's .... https://www.unav.es/gep/MS1604En.html .......... Bring the comments if you've got them! :)