Abstract

This article endeavors to interpret Peirce’s idiosyncratic, late article “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” in light of his earlier thinking on the problem of the justification of inference, his intellectual inheritance from thinkers including Kant and Spinoza, and his philosophical views at large. Peirce’s earlier writings consistently reject proposals that would justify inference by appeal to a divine mind or its properties, as in certain arguments for the “uniformity of nature.” Since, at first face, the “Neglected Argument” appears to propose what he calls the “hypothesis of God” as both abductively justified and as a justification for the possibility of valid abductive inference, one is forced to interpret the notion carefully and not in any religiously dogmatic manner if it is not to be taken as a deviation from these earlier refusals to underwrite logic by appeals to theology. Thus, this article proposes a perhaps “deflated” reading of the “God” Peirce there “hypothesizes,” drawing on his inheritance of Kant and Spinoza: a “Neglected God” for the “Reality of Argument.”