Jason (Immanent Transcendence), Matthew (Footnotes to Plato), Adam, Michael, and Leon have begun their cross-blog reading of Terrence Deacon’s mammoth and ambitious Incomplete Nature. (See also Asher Kay’s post from February and Matt’s post on his conversation with Deacon about Whitehead.)
Deacon’s book has been getting unwelcome attention for his seeming unwillingness to appropriately credit his predecessors (and also for his writing style); see Matt’s summary and this page here for the details.
But process-relational bloggers are quite correct that there’s more to Deacon than the arguments of others, be they emergentists and dynamic systems theorists, autopoieticists like Varela and Evan Thompson, et al. Deacon’s Peircian pedigree is significant, and my own reading of his argument will include careful attention to the degree to which the Peircian underpinnings, which were quite evident in his 1998 tome The Symbolic Species and in work since then, remain in this latest volume.
See here for more on the Deacon-Peirce connection.
That issue came up on the Peirce listserv, and didn’t you enter into that conversation?
Yes, I did, briefly; the last link points to that conversation. Not a lot of discussion of the book yet on Peirce-L, however. I like your and Matt’s conversation so far and am looking forward to more.