This article is prompted by some ideas from Robert S. Brumbaugh and Alfred North Whitehead, in particular. Four different views of experienced time are considered as well as four different conceptions of the practice of life that are the implications of these views of time. Further, four different famous works of literature are considered in the effort to understand these views of time and their implications for the practice of life.

Three ways of relating the structures of human existence to the world are offered by ecological holism, moral extensionism, and biotic communitarianism. Leopold’s attempt to reconcile these three is examined in the light of Peirce’s categories, in order to ascertain how far Leopold’s final position is anthropocentric, ecocentric, neither, or both.

By employing Peirce’s semiotics, Totalitarianism is distinguished indexically from forms of Dictatorship and Authoritarianism. The former can be cast, as Arendt argued, to initiate a project for world domination dispensing with any sense of Authoritarianism in forwarding some purely fictitious conception where violence is manifested in terror. Alternatively, distortion of intellectual activity may issue within Populism so that the rule of Demagogy emerges initiating Despotism or a form of Dictatorship – either Commissarial or Sovereign form – where lawless violence is (...) sustained by secret police inducing fear but not terror. In the case of Authoritarianism induced iconically in a populace, violence may be tolerated accompanying either lawmaking or lawpreserving, both to be separated from Benjamin’s sense of pure violence. The latter – whether humanistically or spiritually understood – transcends both utilitarianism and sheer arbitrariness. (shrink)

An account of what Michael Krausz refers to as “a three tiered structure” within the interpretative process is defended. Starting with the employment of Peircian nomenclature, as employed by Joseph Margolis, artworks and persons - cultural entities - are distinguished from physical entities as tokens of types. But even if culturally emergent entities con be attributed to certain physical atributes in relation to their materiality at the first level of interpretation - the elucidatory - in which such culturally emergent properties (...) are embodied, cultural entities possess certain distinctive Intentional attributes, at a second level of interpretation - thc intentional - not assignable to purely physical properties nor, in the case of artworks such as Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, their creator’s intentions. But in order to make sense of Krausz’s notion of “aspectual reverberation” for an individual appreciator, a third level of interpretation is required - the elaborative - in order to make sense of Peirce’s notion not only of the type and token status of a work of art, but its tone, This third elaborative sense of interpretation is then considered in two ways: experientially in terms of what the spectator can bring to an appreciation of an artwork and performatively with respect to an artist’s interpretation of the work in performance, as in dance for example. Possible attacks on this position are then considered. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between three elements—personality, character, and script—to interpret the idea of someone's identity. A common way to deal with this relationship is in terms of a duality, but a tripartite analysis works better. The article relies heavily on the thought of Charles Hartshorne, with the aid of Simone Weil and Charles Sanders Peirce.

James offers ways for escaping pessimism: i) leaving "the bare facts by themselves" - in construing the scientific order of nature - or permitting ii) a "religious reading to go on" by postulating "supplementary facts which may be discovered" or iii) "believed in". Adopting ii), we can trust the idea that "a still wider world may be there" as a "maybe" and then act as if the invisible world thereby suggested was real, enabling us "to live in the light of (...) " our "religious demands". One way of approaching Bloch's philosophy is to see him as dealing with James's three ways. A case can be made for Bloch's naturalism, phenomenologically understood, akin to James's second way. Yet, Bloch could also be regarded as adopting something like James's third way in terms of a teleologism messianically understood needed to ground the idea of Hope. But can Bloch's reconcile these two conceptions successfully? (shrink)

The Iconic, Indexical and Intellective are conceptions derived from Charles Sanders Peirce's use of his sign theory. In characterizing different kinds of interpretative activity, they can be used to address certain problems in science, technology and the arts.

Language can be cast through words and images where truth claims are thought to lie. They may be either embodied within language or indicate what transcends it. Yet expression is formed through the spoken, written words or images. But what about the imagistic: words doing the work of an image without employing the visual? To grasp how the latter has emerged, the shift in authority from the spoken to the written word will be undertaken. The importance of the shift from (...) the written word to the image can be illustrated in the case of the Renaissance, for example, where the image in the book legitimated, the word. Today the word merely amplifies or justifies the image, located on a screen! From that development the imagistic has evolved raising the problem of its authority and thereby the issue of a concern for truth. (shrink)

Whether science can be regarded as value-neutral remains a contestable issue. Much of that debate is confused because it is not made clear exactly what the term science is meant to include. Three conceptions can be delineated: the iconic, the indexical, and the interpretative. The iconic employs a wide usage of the term science to include any process of inquiry. The indexical refers to the way the outcomes of inquiry can be made subject to testing and criticism. The interpretative conception, (...) growing out of the iconic, emphasizes the methodology of science, marking it off from other forms of inquiry. These three conceptions of science—delineated in the writings of Charles Peirce—have haunted debates in the philosophy of science during the twentieth century. But whichever conception is adopted, none of these three can offer a satisfactory account of the way in which socio-ethical judgments come to be formed for their application in everyday life. (shrink)

Sartre’s Degrees of Consciousness Theory is developed in order to ascertain what this existential conception implies for an account of human intersubjectivity. Once active involvement in instrumental concerns---first degree consciousness---and reflection, whether of an impure kind characterizing second degree consciousness or a pure consciousness---that of a third degree---are distinguished, attention is focused upon the kinds of social relations typifying each kind of consciousness. A model for social relations is suggested to distinguish it from either the conflict model, with which it (...) is often confused, or the ‘we-subject’ model necessary for world exploitation so as to offer a way of grounding a morality as promised at the end of Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

Three paradigms for making sense of the aesthetic experience of nature---Specularism, Scientific Exemplarism and Perspectivalism---are found in the literature on the aesthetics of nature. The first focuses on seeing nature as a picture, the second on grasping aesthetic experience through the categories of scientific enquiry and the third emphasizes a more phenomenological relation between the experienced and the experiencer. After the historical development which fashioned Specularism’s approach to aestheticshas been indicated and the ahistorical nature of Scientific Exemplarism has been explained, (...) the relative strengths of these three paradigms are explored before the implications of the third are related to a possible spiritual view of nature. (shrink)