Charles Sanders Peirce Biography

Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosopher

Occup.	Philosopher
From	USA
Born	September 10, 1839 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Died	April 19, 1914 Milford, Pennsylvania, USA
Cause	Cancer
Aged	74 years

Charles Sanders Peirce, born on September 10, 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist. He is considered to be one of the greatest American philosophers and the founder of pragmatism. Peirce's work ranged from logic and semiotics to economics and physical science. He was also a prominent experimentalist who made important contributions to the fields of metrology and metrology.

Peirce was born into a prominent family of academics and scientists. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was a professor of mathematics and astronomy at Harvard University. His mother, Sarah Mills, was the daughter of a wealthy businessman who had an interest in science. Peirce showed his intellectual potential from an early age, and by the age of 16, he had taught himself the entirety of the six European languages of classical studies.

In 1859, Peirce graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. He then served as a topographer in the United States Coast Survey from 1859 to 1891, where he made significant contributions to the advancement of science in the fields of geodesy, spectroscopy, and gravimetry. He also worked on the design and testing of precision instruments used to measure time and distance.

Peirce returned to Harvard in 1863 to study philosophy, and while there, he became interested in logic and semiotics. He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1869 on "The Logic of Science". After earning his degree, Peirce took on several teaching positions, including at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Peirce's work in philosophy was characterized by a pragmatic approach that sought to ground knowledge in the real world, rather than on abstract theories. Some of his most significant contributions to philosophy include the development of the pragmatic method, pragmatism as a theory of inquiry, and the Peircean classification of signs. Peirce's logic also influenced the development of modern symbolic logic.

Peirce's work had a profound impact on the development of American philosophy and the broader intellectual community. He was a founding member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In recognition of his contributions, he was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society of London in 1902.

Peirce suffered from chronic health problems throughout his life and died on April 19, 1914, in Milford, Pennsylvania, at the age of 74. Although his work was sometimes overlooked during his lifetime, he is now recognized as one of the most significant American philosophers of the 19th century.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written / told by Charles.

Related authors: William James (Philosopher), Philo (Philosopher)

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10 Famous quotes by Charles Sanders Peirce

"It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last"

"Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing"

"Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment"

"The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking"

"It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system"

"All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite"

"Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else"

"The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit; and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise"

"Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic"

"A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be"