Martin Luther King%2C Jr..
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) June 11, 2023: The American journalist and biographer Jonathan Eig discusses the life and time of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his massively researched and lucidly written new nearly 700-page 2023 book King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
I discuss Eig's book in my OEN article "Jonathan Eig on the reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." (dated May 28, 2023):
In Eig's "Epilogue" (pp. 553-557), he mentions "the strength of his [Dr. King's] philosophical and intellectual contributions" (p. 557).
To highlight Dr. King's "philosophical and intellectual contributions" in the present essay, I want to discuss Marcia Pally's article "'Peculiar Relations of Affectability': Peirce and Royce as Resources for the Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr." in the periodical Telos, serial number 182 (Spring 2018): pp. 161-182. For further information about Telos, see www.telospress.com (Even though Eig's book is massively researched, I do not see any references to the essays in the 2018 issue of Telos devoted to Dr. King.)
Marcia Pally is also the distinguished author of the 2016 book Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality (William B. Eerdmans Publishing), which I discuss briefly in my OEN article "Marcia Pally Does the Heavy Lifting to Advance Bernie Sanders' Political Revolution" (dated April 16, 2016):
Now, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and Josiah Royce (1855-1916) were American philosophers associated with the American philosophical movement of pragmatism. Eig does not mention either Peirce or Royce - or the philosophical movement known as pragmatism.
After Pally's introductory section (pp. 161-162), she develops her essay in the following subsections: "Charles Sanders Peirce" (pp. 162-166); "Josiah Royce" (pp. 166-171); "Theological Pragmatism as a Resource for [Boston] Personalism and King" (pp. 171-178); "Some Effects in [King's] Activism" (pp. 178-182); and "Conclusion" (p. 182).
For further information about Boston personalism, see the Wikipedia entry on Personalism. I should point out here that the French Catholic philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), on the occasion of the centennial of Royce's birth, published the book Royce's Metaphysics, translated by Virginia Ringer and Gordon Ringer (Henry Regnery, 1956; orig. French ed., 1955). Perhaps we can take a hint from Pally and speak of Royce also as a resource for Marcel's personalism.
In Pally's introductory section, she quotes Peirce as saying "'Ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectability'" (p. 161).
"Peirce, Royce, and King are a case in point, as King's philosophical and theological framework stood in a 'peculiar relation of affectability' to Peirce's and Royce's 'continuously spreading' pragmatic epistemology and understanding of the transcendent - their theological pragmatism" (p. 161).
"Peirce and Royce were among the resources for both the [Boston] Personalism movement that informed King's thinking and for King himself" (p. 161).
Now, in Pally's subsection "Charles Sanders Peirce," she says that he "start[ed] the American pragmatist school with his 1878 essay 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear'" (p. 162). She says, "Peirce proposed that we don't really have ideas. We have beliefs, habits of thinking about the way things occur that lead us to act in certain ways" (p. 162).
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