Peirce Charles Sanders - Peirce-Arg Philosophers

EDITOR: TED HONDERICH

The purpose of this series is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to the work of a philosopher of major influence and significance.

Plato J.C.B.Gosling

Augustine Christopher Kirwan

The Presocratic Philosophers Jonathan Barnes

Plotinus Lloyd P.Gerson

The Sceptics R.J.Hankinson

Socrates Gerasimos Xenophon Santas

Berkeley George Pitcher

Descartes Margaret Dauler Wilson

Hobbes Tom Sorell

Locke Michael Ayers

Spinoza R.J.Delahunty

Bentham Ross Harrison

Hume Barry Stroud

Butler Terence Penelhum

John Stuart Mill John Skorupski

Thomas Reid Keith Lehrer

Kant Ralph C.S.Walker

Hegel M.J.Inwood

Schopenhauer D.W.Hamlyn

Kierkegaard Alastair Hannay

Nietzsche Richard Schacht

Karl Marx Allen W.Wood

Gottlob Frege Hans D.Sluga

Meinong Reinhardt Grossmann

Husserl David Bell

G.E.Moore Thomas Baldwin

Wittgenstein Robert J.Fogelin

Russell Mark Sainsbury

William James Graham Bird

Peirce Christopher Hookway

Santayana Timothy L.S.Sprigge

Dewey J.E.Tiles

Bergson A.R.Lacey

J.L.Austin G.J.Warnock

Karl Popper Anthony OHear

Ayer John Foster

Sartre Peter Caws

London and New York

Many people share the opinion that Charles S.Peirce is a philosophical giant, perhaps the most important philosopher to have emerged in the United States. Most philosophers think of him as the founder of pragmatism and are aware of doctrinesabout truth and meaning, for examplewhich they describe as Peircean. But, curiously, few have read more than two or three of his best-known papers, and these somewhat unrepresentative ones. On reading further, one finds a rich and impressive corpus of writings, containing imaginative and original discussions of a wide range of issues in most areas of philosophy: he appears to have anticipated many important philosophical discoveries of the last eighty years. However, the interest of Peirces work does not consist simply in these detailed examinations of philosophical problems, for he was, above all, a systematic philosopher. Inspired by his reading of Kant, he devoted his life to providing foundations for knowledge and, in the course of doing so, he brought together a number of different philosophical doctrines: the new logic of relations and quantifiers invented independently by Frege in Germany and Peirce himself in the United States; sophisticated insights into the structure of science and the logic of probability; a systematic theory of meaning and interpretation; a developed philosophy of mathematics; a general theory of value; and a metaphysics incorporating an ambitious evolutionary cosmology. It is not wholly surprising that he is not read more widely. As the reader will see from the introduction, he never produced a unified and coherent presentation of the system. We have to work from a mass of papers, sets of lecture notes, reviews, and manuscripts, and on that basishelped by his many programmatic statementsreconstruct the structure and development of his system. For that reason, this book is probably more concerned with exegesis than others in the series: I have set myself the task of writing the book which I had looked for when I started to read Peircehopefully, a clear presentation of his views on the topics of principal concern to him, and an explanation of how the whole is supposed to fit together. While I have not eschewed criticism, the main focus throughout has been upon providing a guide that will enable people to read Peirces works with an understanding of what he is up to and why he presents his doctrines as he does.

Much of the work on the book was carried out during the academic year 19812 when I was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. This enabled me to work on the Peirce manuscripts in the Houghton Library, and gave me valued leisure to think and write. The trip was made possible by the award of an American Studies Fellowship, jointly funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the United States-United Kingdom Educational Commission (Fulbright-Hayes), and I am pleased to have this opportunity to thank them for their support. I am grateful to Leon Pompa and my colleagues at Birmingham for allowing me to take leave to make use of this opportunity. I have discussed Peirces views with many people, at Haryard and Birmingham, and when I have given talks and papers at conferences and university philosophy departments in Britain and the United States, and I have always profited from these discussions. I cannot thank all of these people individually here, but I would like to acknowledge my colleague Nick Dent whose conversation while the final draft was being prepared and detailed written comments on several chapters have produced substantial improvements. Finally, I hope that my wife, Jo, can feel that the finished book compensates for the separations and stresses of its production. But for her support and encouragement, it would never have been finished.