Charles Peirce:
Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer "Charles S. Peirce" is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating.
Max H. Fisch in Sebeok, The Play of Musement
Charles S Peirce was the son of Benjamin Peirce and Sarah Hunt Mills, the daughter of Senator Elijah Hunt Mills. We note that this surname is pronounced "Purse". Charles was the second of his parents five children. His older brother was James Mills Peirce who became a mathematician in the Mathematics Department at Harvard, and then from 1890 to 1895 served as Dean of the Graduate School at Harvard and, after that, as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Charles' two younger brothers also enjoyed successful careers, Benjamin Mills Peirce as a mining engineer and Herbert Henry Davis Peirce as a diplomat.
Charles was born into a leading American household. His father was perhaps the leading scientist in America and he invited academics, politicians, poets, scientists, and mathematicians into his home. A child prodigy, Charles thrived in the intellectual atmosphere. Benjamin Peirce found it difficult to find students who were bright enough to benefit from his teaching, but in his own children he found the talent that seemed to be lacking elsewhere. He used his own educational ideas in teaching Charles and his other children, and in many ways this did set them up to undertake research. http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Peirce_Charles.html
Charles Sanders Peirce studied philosophy and chemistry at Harvard, where his father, Benjamin Peirce, was professor of mathematics and astronomy. Although he showed early signs of great genius, an unstable personal life prevented Peirce from fulfilling his early promise. He wrote widely and delivered several series of significant lectures, but never completed the most ambitious of his philosophical projects. After a respectable scientific career studying the effects of gravitation with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Peirce taught logic and philosophy for five years at Johns Hopkins University. In 1887, however, he retired to a life of isolation, poverty, and illness in Milford, Pennsylvania.
Peirce's early philosophical development relied on a Kantian theory of judgment, but careful study of the logic of relations led him to abandon syllogistic methods in favor of the study of language and belief.
His place as the founder of American pragmatism was secured by a pair of highly original essays that apply logical and scientific principles to philosophical method.
In The Fixation of Belief (1877) Peirce described how human beings converge upon a true opinion, each of us removing the irritation of doubt by forming beliefs from which successful habits of action may be derived.
This theory was extended in How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878) to the very meaning of concepts, which Peirce identified with the practical effects that would follow from our adoption of them.
In his extensive logical studies, Peirce developed a theory of signification that anticipated many features of modern semiotics, emphasizing the role of the interpreting subject.
©1997-2002 Garth Kemerling.
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