You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In what follows, I try to clarify historically the idea of the third in philosophy and in psychoanalysis. It is an account that has its own point of view, the evidential justification of which, of necessity, is only scantily presented. The exposition suggests an agreement and differences between the various philosophical thirds and the psychoanalytic thirds found in this issue. Even the agreement that emerges is at present controversial. I make no claim that this exposition of the topic escapes the influence of the controversy. My purpose is to provide background and to raise questions.
Peirce (1903) introduced the term the third into philosophy. Of itself, it has nothing directly to do with any psychoanalytic notions of thirds, of triadic relations, or of triangular “space.” It is simply the notion of meaning captured in general concepts, their nature, and their crucial place in knowledge.
Peirce was a realist in the tradition of the medieval scholastic philosopher, Duns Scotus (c. 1270-1308), who was a “moderate,” or Aristotelian realist, as opposed to a Platonic realist. For whatever reason, Peirce either was unaware of or failed to appreciate the devastating criticism that the empiricists (Bacon 1620, Hobbes 1651, Locke 1690) and the rationalists (Descartes 1641, Spinoza 1673) had made of Aristotelian scholastic epistemology. Consequently, Peirce's notion of thirdness is epistemologically naive, insofar