Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is rapidly becoming recognized as the greatest American philosopher. At the center of his philosophy was a revolutionary model of the way human beings think. Peirce, a logician, challenged traditional models by describing thoughts not as "ideas" but as "signs," external to the self and without meaning unless interpreted by a subsequent thought. His general theory of signs -- or semiotic -- is especially pertinent to methodologies currently being debated in many disciplines. This anthology, the first one-volume work devoted to Peirce's writings on semiotic, provides a much-needed, basic introduction to a complex aspect of his work. James Hoopes has selected the most authoritative texts and supplemented them with informative headnotes. His introduction explains the place of Peirce's semiotic in the history of philosophy and compares Peirce's theory of signs to theories developed in literature and linguistics.
A collection of eleven essays on the moral philosophy of the American Polymath Charles S. Peirce (18391914). The essays cover the three normative sciences that Peirce distinguishes (esthetics, ethics, and logic), and their relation to metaphysics.
The PEIRCE EDITION contains large sections of previously unpublished material in addition to selected published works. Each volume includes a brief historical and biographical introduction, extensive editorial and textual notes, and a full chronological list of all of Peirce's writings, published and unpublished, during the period covered.
"This definitive text is the single best work on Peirce's semeiotic (as Peirce would have spelled it) allowing scholars to extrapolate beyond Peirce or to apply him to new areas..." -- Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy Newsletter "... indispensable introduction to Peirce's semiotics." -- Teaching Philosophy "Both for students new to Peirce and for the advanced student, this is an excellent and unique reference book. It should be available in libraries at all... colleges and universities." -- Choice "The best and most balanced full account of Peirce's semiotic which contributes not only to semiotics but to philosophy. Liszka's book is the sourcebook for scholars in general." -- Nathan Houser Although 19th-century philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce was a prolific writer, he never published his work on signs in any organized fashion, making it difficult to grasp the scope of his thought. In this book, Liszka presents a systematic and comprehensive acount of Peirce's theory, including the role of semiotic in the system of sciences, with a detailed analysis of its three main branches -- grammar, critical logic, and universal rhetoric.
In 2014, Peirce will have been dead for one hundred years. The book will celebrate this extraordinary, prolific thinker and the relevance of his idea for semiotics, communication, and cognitive studies. More importantly, however, it will provide a major statement of the current status of Peirce's work within semiotics. The volume will be a contribution to both semiotics and Peirce studies.
Charles Sanders Peirce was born in September 1839 and died five months before the guns of August 1914. He is perhaps the most important mind the United States has ever produced. He made significant contributions throughout his life as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, engineer, and inventor. He was a psychologist, a philologist, a lexicographer, a historian of science, a lifelong student of medicine, and, above all, a philosopher, whose special fields were logic and semiotics. He is widely credited with being the founder of pragmatism. In terms of his importance as a philosopher and a scientist, he has been compared to Plato and Aristotle. He himself intended "to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle." Peirce was also a tormented and in many ways tragic figure. He suffered throughout his life from various ailments, including a painful facial neuralgia, and had wide swings of mood which frequently left him depressed to the state of inertia, and other times found him explosively violent. Despite his consistent belief that ideas could find meaning only if they "worked" in the world, he himself found it almost impossible to make satisfactory economic and social arrangements for himself. This brilliant scientist, this great philosopher, this astounding polymath was never able, throughout his long life, to find an academic post that would allow him to pursue his major interest, the study of logic, and thus also fulfill his destiny as America's greatest philosopher. Much of his work remained unpublished in his own time, and is only now finding publication in a coherent, chronologically organized edition. Even more astounding is that, despite many monographic studies, there has been no biography until now, almost eighty years after his death. Brent has studied the Peirce papers in detail and enriches his account with numerous quotations from letters by Peirce and by his friends. This is a fascinating account of a prodigious talent who, though unable to find a suitable accommodation within his own society, nevertheless managed to produce an enormous body of brilliant work. Brent's analysis uncovers a double tragedy: that of a flawed genius, and of a society unwilling or unable to recognize and support its own best son.
With the present volume, the presentation of Peirce's philosophical thought reaches its metaphysical culmination. It embodies the effort of the founder of Pragmatism to develop a metaphysics which will conform to the canons of scientific method, and at the same time provide for real novelty, objective universal laws of nature, cosmical and biological evolution, feeling, and mind. To his previously published papers on chance, continuity, God, and other metaphysical themes, the editors have added a considerable number of unpublished manuscripts which clarify and develop the implications of Peirce's fundamental world-view. The volume contains those speculative views of Peirce which so deeply influenced his contemporaries, including his discussions of tychism and synechism and of the religious aspects of metaphysics.
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." Book jacket.
This is a study edition of Charles Sanders Peirce's manuscripts for lectures on pragmatism given in spring 1903 at Harvard University. Excerpts from these writings have been published elsewhere but in abbreviated form. Turrisi has edited the manuscripts for publication and has written a series of notes that illuminate the historical, scientific, and philosophical contexts of Peirce's references in the lectures. She has also written a Preface that describes the manner in which the lectures came to be given, including an account of Peirce's life and career pertinent to understanding the philosopher himself. Turrisi's introduction interprets Peirce's brand of pragmatism within his system of logic and philosophy of science as well as within general philosophical principles.
