The Signs of the Times by Christopher Ness

His biographer, Joseph Brent, says that when in the throes of its pain 'he was, at first, almost stupefied, and then aloof, cold, depressed, extremely suspicious, impatient of the slightest crossing, and subject to violent outbursts of temper'. Peirce suffered from his late teens onward from a nervous condition then known as 'facial neuralgia', which would today be diagnosed as trigeminal neuralgia. This proved fateful, because Eliot, while President of Harvard (1869–1909-a period encompassing nearly all of Peirce's working life), repeatedly vetoed Peirce's employment at the university. One of his Harvard instructors, Charles William Eliot, formed an unfavorable opinion of Peirce. At Harvard, he began lifelong friendships with Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Chauncey Wright, and William James. His academic record was otherwise undistinguished. In 1863 the Lawrence Scientific School awarded him a Bachelor of Science degree, Harvard's first summa cum laude chemistry degree.

He went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Arts degree (1862) from Harvard. So began his lifelong fascination with logic and reasoning. At age 12, Charles read his older brother's copy of Richard Whately's Elements of Logic, then the leading English-language text on the subject. He was the son of Sarah Hunt Mills and Benjamin Peirce, himself a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University. Peirce was born at 3 Phillips Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now part of Lesley University's Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences. In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce 'the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician'. The same idea was used decades later to produce digital computers.

As early as 1886, he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits. Additionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning, as well as rigorously formulated mathematical induction and deductive reasoning. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder, which foreshadowed the debate among logical positivists and proponents of philosophy of language that dominated 20th-century Western philosophy.

Įducated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce made major contributions to logic, a subject that, for him, encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philosophy of science. Charles Sanders Peirce ( / p ɜːr s/ PURSS Septem– April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as 'the father of pragmatism'.

The Signs of the Times by Christopher Ness