Abstract
Benedict de Spinoza, C.S. Peirce, and Gilles Deleuze delineate a trajectory through the history of ideas in the dialogue about the potentials and limitations of panpsychism, the view that world is fundamentally made up of mind. As a parallel trajectory to the panpsychism debate in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, this approach can inform and enrich the discussion of the role and scope of mind in the natural world. The philosophies of mind developed by Deleuze and Peirce are Spinozistic in their natural monism but move beyond Spinoza to explain mind as a part of the natural world in semiotic terms.
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Notes
Steven Cahn’s canonical anthology, Classics of Western Philosophy, (Cahn 1997), now in its Seventh Edition, contains only parts I and II of The Ethics. In fairness to Cahn, however, any anthology is, by its nature, selective, and these two parts take up more space than that allotted to either Descartes or Leibniz.
Peirce has only recently begun to gain recognition for his wide range of intellectual accomplishments. Philosopher Thomas Sebeok, for one, asked: “Who is the most original and most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer “Charles S. Peirce” is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician, metaphysician…” (Sebeok 1981 17).
Although Peirce came to call his own version pragmaticism, a term “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Peirce 1960c CP 5.414).
Peirce reiterates this point as part of his explanation of synechism (CP 7.573). Billy Crystal’s character in The Princess Bride popularized the idea when he noted that the Man in Black “was only mostly dead,” having not yet been bound by the total cessation of mind due, of course, to true love.
While all thoughts are signs, it is not the case that all signs are thoughts. Thought-signs demand interpretation via a triadic rather than merely dyadic process.
For example, Steven Nadler notes, “What we find in Spinoza, in fact, are some very suggestive remarks for a particular kind of project, one that represents a naturalistic account of consciousness that is precocious in so far as it points the way to just the kind of empirical, scientific inquiry into consciousness that characterizes contemporary neuroscience and (some) recent philosophy of mind” (Nadler 2008 586).
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Special Issue “Origins of Mind” edited by Liz Stillwaggon Swan and Andrew M. Winters
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Beever, J., Cisney, V. All Things in Mind: Panpsychist Elements in Spinoza, Deleuze, and Peirce. Biosemiotics 6, 351–365 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9167-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-013-9167-7