Gary Slater, C.S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 239 Pps., $109.99.
Gary Slater is an Adjunct faculty member at St. Edward’s University. Slater’s research addresses interactions between science, philosophy, and religion, with a focus on how certain types of logic may be applied to mediate religious conflict. He is a recent graduate of the University of Oxford with a DPhil in Religion and Theology. His dissertation appeared in December 2015, and the title currently under review is a reworking of it.
This study develops resources in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce for the purposes of contemporary philosophy, and is based upon an extended metaphor derived from his writings. There are two fundamental premises upon which this metaphor is based: 1) the totality world’s determinate things are potentially real according to the same modalities and continuous within themselves, and 2) that such things may be placed on a graph according to their relative degrees of specificity and vagueness, aesthetic intensity, and concrete reasonableness. Slater calls this graph the “nested continua model of religious interpretation,” and this book is dedicated to explaining what it is and how it can be used.
Slater’s enduring interest in Peirce is that Peirce’s work provides some of the best material for integrating large- and small-scale claims when exploring the nature of religious interpretation, experience, and truth. The book aims to bring together various disciplines by establishing appropriate contexts for inquiry, which means that it is not so much about providing the right answers per se, but rather facilitating one’s ability to ask the right questions; this means, then, that the book is to act as a heuristic tool, a limited but real step toward a new theological model rather than a method in and of itself. The book finds consonance in the view of “theology” advocated by Robert C. Neville’s Ultimates: Philosophical Theology (2013). With Neville, Slate describes his project as an intellectual roadway between confessional theology and objective religious studies. Slater’s hope is that the model herein developed might serve as a hermeneutic filter by which various inputs such as theological claims, historical details, and poetic expressions of faith, coexist within a common visual space.
Chapters one and two of this work, “Peirce in Context” and “Nested Continua in Context,” respectively, establish and contextualize Peirce’s prevailing influences and provide greater context to his relation to nineteenth-century thought. In chapter one, the various influences upon Peirce are noted to be German Idealism, classical and Scholastic philosophy, empirical logic, and various American influences. In the second chapter, the usage of Existential Graphs, the logic of abduction, and understandings of ordinal and cardinal numbers are explicated with reference to the nested continua model. Peirce’s three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness provide the model with the terms for understanding its logical relations and modes of being. A second feature that this second chapter highlights is Peirce’s taxonomy of iconic, indexical, and symbolic types of signification. A third feature is Peirce’s metaphysics of continuity, i.e., his synechism, which provides the nested continua model with its basic understandings for what entities are and how they engage with their interpreters in a non-reductive manner.
Chapter three, “Toward a Peircean Philosophy of History,” applies Peirce’s philosophy toward history as its own horizon for metaphysical speculation, examining methodological considerations like the status of evidence, explanation, and counterfactual arguments. Chapters four and five, respectively entitled “The Status of History in Peter Ochs’s Scriptural Reasoning,” and “The Status of Time in Robert C. Neville’s Axiology of Thinking,” are pretty well self-explanatory in what they address. Slater notes that Ochs and Neville are advocates of Peircean-influenced philosophical theology. With respect to Peircean logic and metaphysics, both Ochs and Neville have contributed to Slater’s model its basic parameters. Following Ochs, this book contends that our interpretations, despite being objectively linked to time, are inescapably filtered through historical and linguistic communities, the norms of which inform our habits. With respect to Neville, this project follows his thinking that God created the cosmos out of nothing, that time, eternity, and that norms can and should be discussed together in theology. There is a sense, then, that this project applies Neville’s means to Ochs’s ends. Neville’s “axiology of thinking” and Ochs’s Scriptural Reasoning model are two affinities between the thinkers that this work draws out lucidly.
Chapter six, “Trajectories of Peircean Philosophical Theology,” contextualizes the theological speculations warranted by the nested continua model. It begins with a cursory examination of Peirce’s writings on religion. The problem focused upon in this chapter is how to think systematically about the religious dimension of Peirce’s writings, as well as how to trace the trajectories that Peircean philosophical theology has taken in recent decades. Chapter seven, entitled “The Theological Implications of Nested Continua,” explores the constructive theology warranted by Slater’s nested continua model, including caveats that come with applying Peirce’s three categories theologically, as well as the different modes of experiencing and discussing the divine. Analysis in this chapter then turns to the problem of evil, explaining how the model herein developed approaches it.
This work concludes with an assessment of the nested continua model’s various implications. Particularly, further research in fields such as mathematics and logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, history, and theology are called for here. The conclusion also addresses two lines of inquiry to demonstrate the model’s critical and constructive functions. On the critical side, Slater addresses the problem of supersessionism, investigating its origins and historical trajectories with regard to early Christian and Jewish communities. On the constructive side, Slater explores the metaphoric possibility for theology of a “simple sparse sequence,” a sequence that includes one’s immediate context, one’s community, one’s historical situation, one’s temporal location, and eternity, that is effected through integrating levels of analysis found in Ochs and Neville. All in all, I found his nested continua model to be dense, and difficult to integrate into my thinking. Perhaps this is my own dullness academically, but I think the model could have been better elucidated nonetheless. Researchers interested in the works of Peirce will find this volume apropos for their reading.
Bradford McCall
Holy Apostles College and Seminary