Buss, Impact of Faith on Relational Thought 1 THE IMPACT OF FAITH ON RELATIONAL THOUGHT

It is easy to think of possible tensions between one’s faith and academic reality, but I wish to address here a positive relation, namely, the fact that the academy is itself indebted to religious faith. In particular, I want to point to the impact of Jewish and Christian traditions on a phase of thought that began at the end of the nineteenth century. A significant theme of this thinking was the centrality of relations. In fact, in my opinion, relational theory represented the most important intellectual contribution of that period. It included two major lines, both of which will now be described. One line emerged in the work of C. S. Peirce. Specifically, he developed a system of logic that was based on relations. Such a logic had been initiated by Augustus De Morgan in 1859, but Peirce explored it more fully and consistently from 1861 on. A significant feature of this kind of logic was that it involved both particularity and generality. In doing so, it differed from earlier systems of logic. Aristotelian logic had employed classes (general categories in reality) as its fundamental notion. The particularist logic that began at the end of the Middle Ages instead treated only particulars as “real,” while general ideas were considered to represent thoughts about reality but not reality itself. (In fact, even De Morgan still thought of logic in terms of a mental, “psychological,” process and was criticized by Peirce for that in 1865.) Differently, relational logic represented both particularity and generality as “real,” or at