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follows is to draw him into the conversation in order to see whether there are resources from within

pragmatism itself to adjudicate between Rorty`s undertaking and my own outline of a neo-pragmatic

theology.

Yet I proceed with fear and trembling, knowing that Rorty`s dismissal of Peirce cannot be

attributed to ignorance. In commenting on the work of Peircean-inspired semiotician, Umberto Eco,

Rorty confessed that early in his Philosophical career, his desire to understand Peirce

led me to waste my 27

and 28

years trying to discover the secret of Charles Sanders Peirce`s

esoteric doctrine of the reality of Thirdness` and thus of his fantastically elaborate semiotico-
metaphysical System`. I imagined that a similar urge must have led the young Eco to the study
of that infuriating philosopher, and that a similar reaction must have enabled him to see Peirce as
just one more whacked-out triadomaniac.

Peirce`s metaphysics was linked with his logic and scientific experimentalism--Peirce was a capable

astronomer at the Harvard Observatory and physicist at the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey--and these

were repudiated along with the Philosophical tradition in due course. Rorty`s post-Peircean journey has

thus led him to acknowledge only Peirce`s anti-Cartesianism and semiotic exaltation of language as

being of value.

So far as Rorty is concerned, Peirce`s contribution to pragmatism was merely to have

given it a name, and to have stimulated James. Peirce himself remained the most Kantian of thinkers

the most convinced that philosophy gave us an all-embracing ahistorical context in which every other

species of discourse could be assigned its proper place and rank.

York University Press, 1977), and Sandra B. Rosenthal, Speculative Pragmatism (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1986). For a countering genealogy defending the Rortyean extension of classical pragmatism,
see John P. Murphy, Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990).

Rorty, The Pragmatist`s Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation, in Philosophy and Social Hope, 131-

47, quote from 134. The fruits of Rorty`s early labors on Peirce can be tasted in Rorty, Pragmatism, Categories, and
Language, The Philosophical Review 70 (1961): 197-223.

Rorty, Response to Charles Hartshorne, in Saatkamp, Jr., ed., Rorty and Pragmatism, 29-36, esp. 33.

Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 161. Rorty`s charge that Peirce remained a Kantian must surely be a

conscious mis-reading of Peirce. While Peirce`s lengthy study of Kant as a young man is well-known, that he
achieved a radical transformation of Kant is also widely acknowledged: from incognizable Ding an Sich to the
infinitely cognizable; from the transcendental subject to the community of inquirers and their subject of ultimate
opinion; from the transcendental categories to the transcendental modes of inference directed toward the long run of
cognition (see Karl-Otto Apel, Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism, trans. John Michael Krois
[Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981], esp. ix, and Mark Okrent, The Metaphilosophical
Consequences of Pragmatism, in Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, eds., The Institution of Philosophy: A
Discipline in Crisis? [La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1989], 177-98, esp. 179). In fact, David Hall has suggested that