Philosophical Writings of Peirce

Someone once noted that the course of the average person's life is often determined by the ideas of thinkers of whom he/she has never heard. Charles Peirce, the father of Pragmatism, the most infuential 20th century philosophy ( the quintessentially American contribution to the canon of Western thought), and to a degree the modern scientific worldview, is such a figure.Peirce's father was for many years chairman of the Math dept at Harvard, teacher to the plethora of great names and leaders who poured forth from that venerable institution to lead our nation through the mid 19th century. But Peirce's own professional aspirations were dashed by an unfortunate affair with the wife of a colleague during a brief tenure at Johns Hopkins, which led to his banishment from academe. For the duration of his rather long life (he died in 1914), he painfully eeked out a living in a government job and wrote some of the most powerful philosophy of all time. He lived outside of Cambridge, MA where a circle of young scholars who would rise to prominence (notably William James, who would, with Freud, essentially co-found the new science of psychology) gathered at his feet to imbibe the vision of a world that would come to be. The thrust of Peirce's philosophy is the effort to place philosophy on a scientific basis. Peirce's belief was that the theoretical could only have value if practically applicable, and, in the words of the distinguished Buchler, who brilliantly edited, selected, and arranged the papers for this volume, "that the broadest speculative theories should be experimentally verifiable. This attitude rests on the conviction that philosophy is a branch of progressive inquiry rather than a species of art, and that the scientific method alone makes progressive inquiry possible." As opposed to intuitional, mystical, or strictly theoretical subjective processes of justification, prominent in the nineteeth century, Peirce extrolled the scientific method as a social, cooperative enterprise, where objective criteria could be established through processes of universal examination and consensus, by which we could honestly and openly take measure of the veracity of our ideas. Moreover, the scientific method was distinguished from other approaches, as "it conceives of its results as essentially provisional or corrigle" and thus "ensures measurable progress". This concept of "falliblism", the idea that no idea is beyond question, and no criterion for judgement, infallible, is the lynchpin of Peirce's democratization of thought, a gift for the ages. Thus Peirce's famous motto: "DO NOT BLOCK THE ROAD TO INQUIRY!"These papers represent the finest issue of Peirce's massive output (much of which was unfortunately destroyed and/or lost). "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" ought to be read by anyone interested in participating in the democratic process. Not to be overlooked is the eloquence, humor, and compassion found in these papers,