David Corfield 1-2-3

Why do so many philosophers arrive at trichotomies?

• Peirce: firstness, secondness, thirdness; In psychology Feeling is First, Sense of reaction Second, General conception Third, or mediation.

• Popper: World 1 = physical objects and events; Worlds 2 = mental objects and events; World 3 = theories or objective knowledge.

• MacIntyre: encyclopedic, genealogical, traditional

• Cassirer: expressive, life, I, feeling; representative, action, you, willing; significative, work, it, thinking.

Note Cassirer’s classification of philosophies according to which basic phenomenon they take as prior: Descartes, Husserl, Bergson; Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, Heidegger; Kant. Coincidence that the second group overlap with MacIntyre’s genealogical version? Note also how Peirce classifies philosophers according to which categories they emphasise

Cases of expression in the narrow sense are “immediate” figures of expression with a singular content, meaning that they are restricted to precisely one single expressive figure. In contrast, cases of presentation are figures of expression with both general and intuitive content. This means that their content can serve as the sense for many different expressive figures, while it is simultaneously perceivably presented in the context in which these figures occur (an example would be the English term “white,” which expresses a color predicate). Finally, cases of pure meaning are figures of expression with both general and strictly unintuitive content (an example would be the symbol “ω,” used in Cantorian set theory to represent the first transfinite number). Guido Kries, Cassirer’s concept of a symbolic form reconsidered

Cassirer uses this tripartite symbol matrix to identify and systematize myth, language, and science as three forms of expression. In his view, each of the three cases is paradigmatic for one of the three domains: expression in the narrow sense for myth, presentation for language, and pure meaning for science.

Note an affinity between Peirce’s three categories and Cassirer’s triples – Basisphänomene (Ich – Du – Es), functions (expression - presentation - significance), expression (mimetic - analogical - symbolic) (cf. Krois here), both focus on semiosis.)}

[Kants 3 critiques]