In 1863 the Lawrence Scientific School awarded him a Bachelor of Science degree, Harvard's first summa cum laude chemistry degree. Peirce went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Arts degree (1862) from Harvard. Its consequences may have led to the social isolation of his later life. 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".
He suffered from his late teens onward from a nervous condition then known as "facial neuralgia", which would today be diagnosed as trigeminal neuralgia. 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 mathematics and astronomy 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. Peirce believed an epistemic fallibilism and anti- skepticism went along with these views.īiography Early life Peirce's birthplace. He also held a commitment to the ideas of continuity and chance as real features of the universe, views he labeled synechism and tychism respectively. įor metaphysics, Peirce was an " objective idealist" in the tradition of German philosopher Immanuel Kant as well as a scholastic realist about universals. 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. He was one of the founders of statistics. Peirce's study of signs also included a tripartite theory of predication.Īdditionally, he defined the concept of abductive reasoning, as well as rigorously formulating mathematical induction and deductive reasoning.
He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics or study of signs, 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.
Peirce to symbolic logic are more numerous and varied than those of any other writer-at least in the nineteenth century." For Peirce, logic also encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philosophy of science. Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".Įducated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce meanwhile made major contributions to logic, such as theories of relations and quantification. According to philosopher Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Charles Sanders Peirce ( / p ɜːr s/ PURSS Septem– April 19, 1914) was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".
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