First, a small error in your attribution to Peirce of the garden variety
disgust with Hegel of 20th century anti-idealists like Russell. As it
happens, Peirce, one of the few English-speaking philosophers of his
generation to have read Hegel's Science of Logic, thought its author to be
perhaps the greatest philosopher who had ever lived. He was, however,
critical of the inexactness of German logic generally and of Hegel's
penchant for undermining the stability of logical terminology (a violation
of what Peirce called the "ethics of terminology", without which, he
thought, scientific advance becomes much more difficult). Your discussion
of Hegel generally, though not essential to your argument, repeats the
misattribution to him of the Fichtean method of
thesis-antithesis-synthesis. You are closer to the logical thrust of his
dialectical method in your remarks on Aufhebung. A parallel Peircean
discussion of how we can both cancel out and retain reality in Thirdness,
written before he was acquainted with Hegel, can be found in his remarks
of abstraction in his early essay on "A New List of the Categories"
(1867).
This essay, of course, introduces a deeper problem that we have discussed
previously. Though your revised notion of Peirce's categories as
"meta-level" with respect to the other ontological categories in your
system is an improvement, it does not change your use of these categories
to "generate" an ontology. With respect to Peirce's categories, this
misconceives their importance. The categories in Peirce are
pre-ontological-- that is, they mark the movement from substance to being
as such. Peirce uses them to generate his system of sign-types but not an
ontology. The best one can do with them ontologically is to use them in
one aspect to discuss "modes" of being. The reason for this is that the
very notion of being presupposes the Peircean categories, and every
representation of being is done in signs that can themselves be modally
distinguished into types in which the categories will recursively appear.
But to skip the intervening mediation of signs and to speak of the
Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness of e.g. "woman", does not really
reflect what Peirce is about. On the other hand, analyzing signs of woman
as icon-index-symbol or as tone-token-type is a Peircean way of proceeding.
I am not arguing here that you are obliged to follow a pure Peircean line,
merely that the point of departure needs to be flagged, in keeping with
the ethics of terminology. As you put it so well elsewhere, wherever there
is a difference, we can make a distinction. There is, I believe, a very
fundamental distinction to be made be between Peirce's Categories of
Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness and the same terms as they appear in your
forthcoming work. The advantage I find in preserving the integrity of
Peirce's approach-- the pragmatic justification, if you will-- is that his
categories preserve a point of view from which we may continually revise
systems that attempt to harden the flow of experience into set forms.