Abstract

Several excellent scholars have studied and explicated Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. However, Peirce sometimes indicates that aside from his formal, Cenopythagorean categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness there is a second set of categories, a set of categories I call the material categories. Unfortunately, Peirce nowhere offers an account of what those categories are. Developing suggestions throughout Peirce’s writings, this essay offers an account of the Peircean material categories as the extremes of a continuum of qualitative intensity identified as Forcefulness and Yieldingness.

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