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Charles Sanders Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 10th, 1839. -
Peirce graduated from Harvard in 1859. -
Peirce received his bachelor of science degree in Chemistry and graduated summa cum laude.
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Deductive arguments or probable inferences, and inductive arguments or probable inferences, were the two classes that philosophers had divided arguments into. Peirce believed that inductive arguments could be split into two distinct subclasses, Inductive inferences, and abductive inferences. Abductive inference is most similar to a hypothesis, a guess based on previous information. This argument was new, different from both Inductive and Deductive, and provided new options for philosophers. -
Peirce's two best-known works are the articles "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear". Both were published in Popular Science Monthly. Both works were identified by William James, Peirce's colleague and a philosophy teacher at Harvard, as the source of pragmatism. Pragmatism being the philosophical belief that the true test of a theory lies in its practical application, based on realism rather than theories relying solely on notional ideas.
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Peirce held a second job teaching at the Department of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins. He taught logic with J.J. Sylvester, the head of the math department, and a famous mathematician whom he had met through his father, Benjamin Peirce.
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Peirce's job at Johns Hopkins was terminated for personal and religious reasons. Afterward, he took up work with the U.S. Coast Guard. During his work with the military, Peirce worked on constructing the 'Century Dictionary, one of the largest encyclopedic dictionaries in English, and writing book reviews for 'The Nation'. His contract with the military ended in 1891 due to overfunding and Peirce's procrastination.
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In 1914, Peirce's widow Juliette Annette Froissy sold all of his unpublished manuscripts to the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. -
Charles Sanders Peirce passed away on April 19, 1914, in Milford, Pennsylvania. -
In the 1930s, 'The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce' was published. Despite Peirce's name, the book gained controversy because a large majority of it was sloppily curated by the editors, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks, after Peirce's death. The book is considered virtually unreadable, due to the nature of skipping from early to late and back to early in Peirce's career. Several pieces of the writing contradict others, despite the editors placing them back to back. -
In approximately 1955, Carolyn Eisele, a student at Columbia University, happened upon a large amount of Peirce's unpublished manuscripts. Throughout the 50s to the 70s, Eisele oversaw the publication of several of these manuscripts, including 'New Elements of Mathematics', which she edited.
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In 1976, Max H. Fisch and Edward Moore created the Peirce Edition Project at Indian University-Purdue University. The two created the project to organize Peirce's works chronologically from the 57 years he was writing. -
In the 1980s, the PEP produced the Chronological Edition, a published edition of all of Peirce's major writings from 1857 to 1892. The book, currently, has over 7 volumes, each detailing a specific period in Peirce's writing career. Despite the book's publication following Peirce's death, the Chronological Edition provides the most accurate timeline of Peirce's work and ideology. -
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- Peirce, Charles S., et al. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Indiana Univ. Press, 1998.
- Peirce, Charles S., and De Cornelis Waal. Illustrations of the Logic of Science. Open Court, 2014.
- Peirce, Charles Sanders, and Arthur Walter Burks. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Thoemmes Press, 1998.