Hegel, Peirce and us

Abstract

Historically, our theme is situated within the triangle of three of Kant's students: Hegel (1770-1831), Bolzano (1781-1848) and Peirce (1839-1914). All three wanted to change Kant's strict separation of philosophy and science by developing a new conception of logic. Bolzano inaugurated the so-called linguistic turn of philosophy which became the guiding principle of all analytical philosophy (Dummett, 2014) and he opposed Hegel’s unity of concept and object of knowledge. Charles Peirce took a middle position, a position that is expressed in his so-called Pragmatic Maxim (Peirce, CP 5.3). Taken together we might say that a universal principle of complementarity of meaning and reference, or of meaning and information (in the sense of Shannon) finds its origin in Post-Kantian philosophy. We encounter here the very same approach of principled thinking endorsed by Einstein in physics (special theory of relativity) or by the formal axiomatic approach in mathematics (Hilbert)!

Key Words: Bolzano, Hegel, Peirce; Complementarity of sense and reference; Geometry from Euclid to Einstein; Hilbert.