Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10, 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Benjamin Peirce, a Harvard professor in astronomy and mathematics. After graduating from Harvard College in 1859, he attended the Lawrence Scientific School and graduated summa cum laude in chemistry. He spent his early years as a computing aide to his father and made contributions to his father's research for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.

In the 1870s, Charles contributed to the theory and practice of the motion of a pendulum and began the determination of the length of the meter in terms of a wavelength. During this time, Peirce's interests grew in the field of logic, and he set out to acquaint himself with the methods and reasoning of all sciences. Between 1878 and 1911, he published several papers on chemistry, philology, mathematics, physics, geodesy, spectroscopy, the philosophy of history and religion, and the history of philosophy.

As a philosopher, Peirce ascribed to the "logic of science"- i.e. the importance of induction and what he call "abduction" or the "forming and accepting on probation of a hypothesis to explain surprising facts" (1996 Encyclopaedia Britannica). He considered himself a systematic philosopher and believed in Kant's architectonic theory of philosophy (i.e. "the art of constructing system").

Peirce thought his "one contribution to philosophy" was his "new list of categories," or a priori elements of understanding, which were analogous to Kant's categories. While Kant claimed there are 12 categories, Peirce reduced them to three: Quality, Relation, and Representation, which he later called Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. He created this list to grant systematic support to his division of arguments in to abductions, inductions, and deductions, all of which he believed were equally important to the practice of logic.

In accordance with the architectonic theory, Peirce was constantly aware of a definite philosophical system that guided his studies. First, he would formulate his position as completely as possible, and then solve any difficulties in it piece by piece. Peirce would set aside a large portion of a system so that he could focus his entire attention on a single problem. When all these difficulties were resolved, he would return to the system and revise it as a whole. Even the various philosophical phases Peirce experienced throughout his career were subject to this systematic method and simply "different revisions of a single overall architectonic system" (Murphey, The Development of Peirce's Philosophy, 3).

Murphey compares Peirce's philosophy to a house that retains its exterior form, but undergoes constant remodeling from within. He suggests that Peirce could alter the rooms themselves and that he worked in different wings of the house at different times. However, the order of his rebuilding must depend upon the house itself, as "modification of one part necessitates the modification of another" (4).

Peirce's contributions to the architectonic theory of philosophy served as a foundation for the seminar itself. Though the topics we studied were seemingly unrelated, our systematic approach to analyzing them caused us to draw definite connections. Peirce's constant rebuilding of the symbolic ";houq" of philosophy sparked our interest in the importance of the parts and the whole, a theme which we pursued in several areas of study.