A Vicious Order of Thought
Peirce does not let go of his contention that philosophy has essentially been wrong from the foundation. Else why call the placing of metaphysics above logic a “vicious order of thought?”
Peirce was a scientist and a mathematician. These two ventures combine rigorous abstract thought and experimental ventures that depend on observation and all the components logic brings to such processes. Science is measurement and its goal is exactitude. Mathematics is the exploration to the very borders of abstraction, abstraction that may yield up results applicable to life.
To see metaphysics as the foundation of logic means any supposition may modify and control thought itself.
In a practical sense, such a placement is common. Any thinking that starts with supposition and seeks to prove its logic is suspect. The right order is logic evaluates the contentions metaphysics brings to the table. When logic precedes metaphysics, statements of a metaphysical nature are in the realm of reason, scientific method and pragmaticist common sense.
It is an event when one who is placed in the same bracket with Aristotle employs a robust pejorative like “vicious” to describe the output of the bulk of philosophy. But to Triadic Philosophy it rings true and history provides a relevant footnote.
Peirce: CP 2.38 Cross-Ref:††
38. Of logics which in modern times more or less take for granted special systems of metaphysics, the earliest were a series of Aristotelian treatises. Gassendi †1 wrote an Epicurean logic, but of course knew nothing of the book of Philodemus on induction which turned up, centuries later, in Herculaneum.†2 The celebrated Port Royal logic entitled L’Art de Penser, of Antoine Arnauld (published in 1662) and Clauberg’s Logica Vetus et Nova [1654], were Cartesian works. Malebranche wrote his own Recherche de la Vérité (1674–5) which likewise professed to be Cartesian, but was in truth rather Malebranchian, like much else called Cartesian. The Medicina Mentis of Graf von Tschirnhaus auf Kesselwalde [1687], today a familiar name to algebraists, stole the thunder of Spinoza. Locke’s philosophy was represented in the treatises of Crousaz †3 Isaac Watts,†4 and perhaps we may add of Condillac.†5 Leibnitzianism, systematized by Wolff, numbered its logics by scores. Kantianism had its Krug †6 and Esser,†7 to mention only those of whom English readers are likely to know something; and every subsequent German philosopher, Baader, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Dühring, down to Häckel, has been followed by his train of logicians.†8 Thus, a large proportion of all the logics that have ever been written have more or less pursued this vicious order of thought.
