Charles Sanders Peirce: Immensely important if not fully realised

Throughout his articles, and with his famous pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce explored what it was to say that something was hard or heavy

Charles Sanders Peirce in the 1900s (New York Public Library)

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was unusual for a philosopher in that he published no major work outlining his thought. Nevertheless, his contributions to the subject are immense, if not yet fully realised.

Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, or, as he later came to call it, ‘pragmaticism’. However, it would be a mistake to suppose that this was the extent of his intellectual interests, since he wrote prolifically on subjects as diverse as mathematics, economics, anthropology, the history of science, language, psychology, and more. Indeed, his published output runs to some 12,000 pages, and there are at least a further 80,000 extant pages which have yet to be published.

Peirce, the son of Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in September 1839. He was brought up in an atmosphere of intellectual excellence which befitted his father’s status as one of the country’s most esteemed mathematicians. Some of the top scientific and philosophical thinkers of the time were regular visitors to the Peirce household, and Charles was encouraged to be intellectually curious and independent from a very early age.