I believe that there are important similarities between Buddhist and pragmatist philosophies that have not been identified yet. In particular, I will examine the Buddhist doctrines of  śūnyatā, idaṃpratyayatā, and anātman, on the one hand, and the pragmatist doctrines of anti-essentialism,  process ontology, and synechism, on the other. According to the doctrine of  śūnyatā  (emptiness, void), phenomena have no permanent essence; they simply continually transform into each other. This coincides with the anti-essentialism of the classical pragmatists. According to the doctrine of idaṃpratyayatā (conditionality), all phenomena arise from conditions. Then the conditions arise from their conditions, and so on, ad infinitum. That seems to entail a process ontology. Of the classical pragmatists, Peirce crafted evolutionary cosmology, which is a process ontology, according to which even laws of nature have evolved. According to the doctrine of anātman, there is nothing to the self that does not reduce to the five senses. Here the pragmatist counterpart is different: Peirce and Dewey argued that there is nothing to the self that does not reduce to habit.

Dr Lindholm holds an MSc degree in control engineering and a PhD degree in philosophy. He has recently defended his PhD thesis, according to which knowledge is practice. He studies rational worldview from the standpoint of fallibilism, pragmatism, naturalism, philosophy of technics, and philosophy of economics. His ideas include cybernetic epistemology, technics as hermeneutics, and the potential practice-ladenness of all experience.

Scholars of the history of philosophy of science read and hear a lot about Duhem, Mach, Poincaré, and the members of the Vienna Circle. C.S. Peirce, however, is not generally considered a canonical figure in the history of philosophy of science. But in the early years of the logical empiricist movement in the United States, Peirce received a warm reception from prominent representatives, proponents, and sympathizers of logical empiricism including Charles Morris, Ernst Nagel, Herbert Feigl, and Phillip Frank. This reception was short-lived though and Peirce gradually disappeared from the mainstream philosophy of science while logical empiricism turned into a formidable movement.

In this talk, I begin by discussing some examples of the early reception of Peirce’s philosophy in the works of Morris, Nagel (and his student Justus Buchler), Feigl, Reichenbach, and Frank. These examples show a persistent and gradually refining engagement with various topics in Peirce’s philosophy of science from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s. I then offer some evidence for the eventual marginalization of Peirce in the mainstream philosophy of science and provide some explanations for it.

Dr Mohammadian is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. He specializes in general philosophy of science, history of philosophy of science, metaphysics, and Islamic philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science (Philosophy of Science Track) from the University of Notre Dame in the United States. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values, an IVC Fellow at the Institute Vienna Circle, University of Vienna, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. He has published in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Synthese, Metascience, and the European Journal for Philosophy of Science.