The Essential Writings

by Charles Sanders Peirce, Edward C. Moore

Physicist, mathematician, and logician Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) was America's first internationally recognized philosopher, the man who created the concept of "pragmatism," later popularized by William James. Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings is a comprehensive collection of the philosopher's writings, including: "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man" (1868), which outlines his theory of knowledge; a review of the works of George Berkeley; papers from between 1877 and 1905 developing the ground of pragmatism and Peirce's theory of scientific inquiry; his basic concept of metaphysics (1891-93); and the important 1902 articles in Baldwin's dictionary on his later pragmatism (or pragmaticism), uniformity, and synechism. Included are Peirce's well-known essays: "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear."

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Logic, Language

322 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

About the author

Charles Sanders Peirce (/ˈpɜrs/, like "purse", September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.

In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician". Webster's Biographical Dictionary said in 1943 that Peirce was "now regarded as the most original thinker and greatest logician of his time."

An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and foremost, a logician. He made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology and philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits; the same idea was used decades later to produce digital computers.

Bertrand Russell (1959) wrote, "Beyond doubt [...] he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever." Alfred North Whitehead, while reading some of Peirce's unpublished manuscripts soon after arriving at Harvard in 1924, was struck by how Peirce had anticipated his own "process" thinking. Karl Popper viewed Peirce as "one of the greatest philosophers of all times". Yet Peirce's achievements were not immediately recognized. His imposing contemporaries William James and Josiah Royce admired him, and Cassius Jackson Keyser at Columbia and C. K. Ogden wrote about Peirce with respect, but to no immediate effect.

The first scholar to give Peirce his considered professional attention was Royce's student Morris Raphael Cohen, the editor of an anthology of Peirce's writings titled Chance, Love, and Logic (1923) and the author of the first bibliography of Peirce's scattered writings. John Dewey studied under Peirce at Johns Hopkins and, from 1916 onwards, Dewey's writings repeatedly mention Peirce with deference. His 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry is much influenced by Peirce. The publication of the first six volumes of the Collected Papers (1931–35), the most important event to date in Peirce studies and one that Cohen made possible by raising the needed funds, did not prompt an outpouring of secondary studies. The editors of those volumes, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, did not become Peirce specialists. Early landmarks of the secondary literature include the monographs by Buchler (1939), Feibleman (1946), and Goudge (1950), the 1941 Ph.D. thesis by Arthur W. Burks (who went on to edit volumes 7 and 8), and the studies edited by Wiener and Young (1952). The Charles S. Peirce Society was founded in 1946. Its Transactions, an academic quarterly specializing in Peirce, pragmatism, and American philosophy, has appeared since 1965.

Peirce has gained a significant international following, marked by university research centers devoted to Peirce studies and pragmatism in Brazil (CeneP/CIEP), Finland (HPRC, including Commens), Germany (Wirth's group, Hoffman's and Otte's group, and Deuser's and Härle's group), France (L'I.R.S.C.E.), Spain (GEP), and Italy (CSP). His writings have been translated into several languages, including German, French, Finnish, Spanish, and Swedish. Since 1950, there have been French, Italian, Spanish, British, and Brazilian Peirceans of note.

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peirce occupies a curious position in the history of philosophy. Emerging from a late 19th century American milieu still on the heels of Romantic transcendentalism and Social Darwinism, he stands as an untimely thinker. His background as a mathematician/logician and concern with the foundation of philosophy as a science draws immediate parallels to his European contemporary Husserl—and like the latter's phenomenology, Peirce's pragmatism attends to the interactions between the empirical particular and the conceptual general. However, it may be said that Peirce preemptively adopts a post-phenomenological stance by retreating from Cartesian self-certainty. Indeed, Peirce comes close to a deconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology when he argues in "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties" that there is no power of introspection (as is necessary for eidetic reduction) but rather an observation of external, differing signs (!). One may therefore be tempted to locate Peirce as an early semiotician alongside Saussure at the risk of neglecting the metaphysical dimension of his philosophy, which adopts a (heterodox for an American philosopher) objective-idealist monism bordering medieval pan-psychism. Matter is "effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws". Traces of Whitehead's process-philosophy, then, are not far from Peirce's purview—the Peirceian universe is one of ongoing evolution, tending not towards a final Absolute but provisional becomings. One also finds a precursor of Popper's verificationism in Peirce's prescription of what scientific research ought to do: given the social/human/economic factors involved, experiments should focus on that which grants most epistemological value. The ties to analytic philosophy are numerous and I cannot do them full justice in this review—needless to say, however, that pragmatism's account of "what things do = what things are" is a nascent form of the late Wittgensteinian theory of meaning, and one could undoubtedly find contemporary Continental applications of this idea.

Peirce's writing is often obscure and muddied (many of his central theories—several of which are described only in a passing paragraph—are still subject to ongoing scholarly debate). His texts are in short-essay form, lacking the systematization and grand drive of a Husserl or Hegel. However, they are nevertheless worth pilfering through, if not only for the sheer ingenuity I hope to have pointed at in this brief outline.

[Kurt]

So if this is the "Essential" Peirce, could it theoretically be cut down to just "The Best Of"? I'm half-joking, but I suspect some of the more science-based philosophizing is outdated (actually, I'm almost certain the Lamarckian evolutionary stuff is) and could have been cut without missing too much of his philosophy, or maybe reduced to a footnote to provide context. Still, most of what's here seems like good stuff if you want to understand what Peirce was all about.

What he's all about is a bit tricky for me to assess, unfortunately - some of his points he bases off of mathematical and physical concepts went over my head and made me wish I knew more in those fields of study. Plus he's demonstrably wrong on some things; Peirce really suffers from not having seen much of the 20th century unfold, in which his optimism about the convergence of truths-as-reality was trampled under authoritarian feet time and time again (actually, he does have some notion of this which he discusses in one essay, but he doesn't really have an answer to this problem, which seems like a serious flaw to me). Still, I appreciate the basic points of pragmaticism, his intolerance for metaphysical fooling around and the fact that he is a hard-line empiricist. It's also fun to trace his influence as it flows into Alfred North Whitehead (whose "process" seems to have a lot in common with Peirce's continuity) and, more regrettably, into the perversions of the logical positivists who have given logic-based analytic philosophers everywhere a bad name.

[Marcus Lira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually, I just read four articles (namely "Fixation of Belief", "How to make your ideas clear", "What is Pragmatism", and "Issues of Pragmatism). Except for the last one, which is somewhat dense, it was a pleasant and inspiring read.