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But here, I am responsible not to Rorty but to Peirce. And, I would suggest, so is Rorty. Insofar

as he seeks to cultivate and nurture the edifying conversation of philosophy, he is obligated, especially

after providing strong misreadings of the tradition, to attend to any forthcoming response from those he

has (mis-)appropriated. In what follows then, I can only very briefly outline Peirce`s own response to the

problematic sketched at the end of section two--regarding the issues of realism vs. antirealism; of

correspondence vs. coherence views of truth; and of pragmatism and the God-question--in order to push

through the question of whether or not the integrity of a neo-pragmatically framed theology is inevitably

compromised. In the process, I suggest not only that Peirce provides satisfactory responses to preserve

the possibility of a convergence between pragmatism and theology today, but that he also gives us, in the

words of Robert Cummings Neville, a legitimate and more viable highroad around modernism than that

negotiated by Rorty.

So, what would Peirce have to say about Rorty`s antirealism? Now, while Peirce would certainly

not be the only one to reject the kind of antirealism of Rorty and others following from the linguistic

turn,

my reading of Peirce for purposes at hand is to invoke his revisioning of Kant`s categories--the

doctrines of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness--as providing the necessary conceptual underpinnings

insofar as Rorty has taken not taken seriously Peirce`s reconstruction of Kant`s categories, especially the category of
the aesthetic, it is Rorty who has remained Kantian in a manner that Peirce has not (Richard Rorty, 70).

Robert Cummings Neville, The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992); ch. 1 of this

book is devoted to an exposition of the Peircean alternative around modernity. See also Neville, American
Philosophy`s Way around Modernism (and Postmodernism), in Thomas P. Kasulis and Robert Cummings Neville,
eds., The Recovery of Philosophy in America: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Smith (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997),
251-68, and Peter Ochs` lead chapter on Peirce in Ochs, et al., Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy:
Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 43-88. Other theologians who
have taken this Peircean route include Robert Corrington, Donald Gelpi, and Cornel West. See Corrington, The
Community of Interpreters: On the Hermeneutics of Nature and the Bible in the American Philosophical Tradition,
2

ed., Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 3 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995); on Gelpi, my

own In Search of Foundations: The Oeuvre of Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., and Its Significance for Pentecostal Theology
and Philosophy, Journal of Pentecostal Theology, forthcoming; and on West, Mark David Wood, Cornel West and
the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

See, e.g., Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism, The

Persistence of Reality I (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986); C. G. Prado, The Limits of Pragmatism
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987); James F. Harris, Against Relativism: A
Philosophical Defense of Method (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1992); Frank B. Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism, and
Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); D.
Vaden House, Without God or His Doubles: Realism, Relativism and Rorty, Philosophy of History and Culture 14