Charles Sanders Peirce
From Philosopedia
Peirce, Charles Sanders (10 September 1839 - 19 April 1914)
Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Peirce (pronounced purse) greatly influenced [William James and John Dewey with his view that logic is the beginning of all philosophic study, and what an idea means is to be found in examining its consequences.
He coined the term “pragmatism,” which James used with acknowledgment, although it is reported that originally James had chosen to use the word “humanism.”
Peirce was a scientist. But, according to Charles Hartshorne, Peirce held matter to be “ ‘mind hide-bound by habit,’ the portion of nature in which creative spontaneity is slight, hence largely without consciousness, though not without feeling. There is a continuum of all possible (thought not of all actual) forms and qualities, so that differences commonly regarded as of kind (such as that between a color sensation and a sound sensation) are really differences of degree (theory of Synechism). The whole of evolution is a ‘divine poem.’
In a few passages of Peirce’s writings it seems to be suggested that God is in some manner enriched by the world process, himself a temporal being, but in others God is referred to in traditional fashion as wholly independent of time and the world.”
For those who find such a view metaphysical, Hartshorne the metaphysician continued:
- Primarily a logician, Peirce thoroughly revised many portions of logic and was one of the chief creators of symbolic logic. Among the matters best worked out in his fragmentary and often difficult writings are his frequency theory of probable reasoning, his theory of the categories (also called Phenomenology), and his studies of the kinds and uses of signs.
Peirce lost his position at Johns Hopkins because of allegations that he had seduced his colleagues’ wives. As a result, he spent his last days in poverty and obscurity. After Peirce’s death, Morris R. Cohen edited Peirce’s major essays, entitling them Chance, Love, and Logic (1923). For further evidence that Peirce was theistic, see Hartshorne’s 1941 article, “A Critique of Peirce’s Idea of God.” Peirce’s collected papers total eight volumes and were published from 1931 to 1958. A 1993 biography by Joseph Brent points out that it was William James, in a lecture at Berkeley, who named Peirce as the founder of pragmatism, although Peirce himself never used the term in print until afterwards, then favoring the term “pragmaticism.”
(See an article about Peirce by Murray G. Murphey in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6. Also see the entry by Leroy F. Searle of the University of Washington in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism which discusses Peirce’s pragmaticist maxim that “the entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct that, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.” Peirce held that it is by inquiry and experiment that we seek the “fixation of belief,” while the ethics of the process is profoundly summarized in the slogan that Peirce would have on “every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.” Writes Searle, this means that “no belief is ever ultimate, and no one ever gets the last word.”)
