ASSESSING PETER OCHS THROUGH PEIRCE, PRAGMATISM AND THE LOGIC OF SCRIPTURE

This article provides an interpretive, critical overview of Peter Ochs' Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture , and raises four thematic criticisms. The first considers Ochs turn to language, and its implications for pragmatism and understanding Peirce. The second interrogates the tension between Ochs' particularism and Peirce's universalism. The third concerns the relation between science and religion implied by Ochs, and its adequacy in relation to Peirce, pragmatism and modernity. The final question regards the scope of the community of inquirers Ochs seems to have in view, in light of pragmatism's seemingly more general concern with an inclusive democracy.     

INTRODUCING THE WORK OF PETER OCHS

Peter Ochs' work offers a rehabilitation of the wisdom tradition celebrated by rabbinic Judaism. While Jewish philosophy, long occupied by the particular names and categories of the given order, has neglected the deepest insights of the rabbinic appreciation of wisdom, Ochs' work recovers wisdom as a metaphysically imaginative and pragmatically effective exercise of reasoning. The four articles offered in this symposium on the work of Peter Ochs by David Lamberth, James K. A. Smith, Nicholas Adams and Leora Batnitzky, together with Peter Ochs' response and Steven Kepnes' conclusion, offer a striking illustration of the reach and depth of Ochs' recovery of wisdom. This reach extends but is not limited to a 'new thinking' and agenda for philosophical theology applied to its specific areas of concern, including the relationship between philosophy and theology, the nature of religious studies, and the practice of Scriptural Reasoning.