The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was, in the words of one modern philosopher who knew and understood Peirce's life and work as few have done since, namely Max Fisch (1981): "the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced"[1]. Fisch goes on to credit Peirce with having maintained a truly vast range of interests and consistent and lasting involvement in many different fields of science throughout his life - he was, he writes: "Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, meteorologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician [and] metaphysician[.]" [ibid.]
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 10, 1839, Charles Peirce was second son of the influential and respected Harvard mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Peirce and his wife Sarah Hunt Mills Peirce. His original and innovative thought and proliferous writing (some estimates, see e.g. Fisch, Ketner & Kloesel (1979), put the total number of publications throughout his life to 800, running to around 12,000 pages, and his complete Nachlass comprises around 100.000 pages in all (though estimates vary - see also footnote 2 below)) remained largely unread on a wider scale during his lifetime, and he was generally misunderstood in his own time. Partly due to this fact, as well as to his rather complex and abrasive personality as well as his general lack of concern for what others might have thought of him, both his academic and private lives were not easy ones, and he died of cancer in 1914 in more or less abject poverty with his greatest, life-long philosophical project not yet realised.
It is not the purpose of this essay to examine Charles Sanders Peirce's tortuous and tragic life history in detail - those readers who may be interested in doing so are encouraged to read those more specifically biographical works which have already been published, such as those by Joseph Brent (1993) and Robert Corrington (1993) - see also Murphey 1993 for some useful biographical information on the dynamics of the father-son relationship between Charles and Benjamin Peirce. I think though, in passing, that it is important to mention here that it is still my, and many other much more experienced Peirce scholars' than I, contention that a completely adequate, fair and fully representative biography of Charles Sanders Peirce multifaceted and intensely productive life, thought and work has yet to be written, and it is only to be hoped that this sorry lack in the social and cultural history of philosophy and science will be satisfactorily remedied at some future time.
In this essay I have drawn heavily on three main historical and explicatory sources. Only the first of these can really be considered as a true "primary" source, in the sense that it was actually written by Peirce himself, and although it is not generally considered among his philosophical or scientific writings, it is nonetheless a specialised piece of scientific writing which is of great interest in this particular context, namely the written application for funding of his work that Peirce made in 1902 to the Carnegie Institution, the basic structure and contents of which will be discussed in some detail here.
My most important secondary source is the slightly revised 1993 version of Murray Murphey's useful and highly informative book, first published in 1961: "The Development of Peirce's Philosophy" (Murphey 1993), which I have found especially functional in this particular context, in the sense that Murphey during his research and writing of it had access (which very few Peirce scholars have actually had) to the majority of Peirce's hand-written manuscripts now stored at the Harvard University library, and he has thus been able to draw in his discussions on many manuscripts that have not yet been (and perhaps never will be) published. This is something which seems to me absolutely vital if one is to develop a clear understanding of how Peirce worked steadily and consistently on developing and refining his philosophical system throughout the whole of his working life. Not only has Murphey had access to these seldomly read materials, but he has also managed to build a comprehensive, and by and large clear and easily readable overview of the various transitions through which Peirce's thought and writing went over time.
The third and final source regarding Peirce's semeiotic is a recent book from the hand of James Jakób Liszka (1996): "A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce", recently characterised by such an eminent Peirce scholar as Nathan Houser as "[t]he best and most balanced full account of Peirce's semeiotic which contributes not only to semiotics but to philosophy". This being, as far as I am able to judge, is an even modest appraisal of this well-written and researched piece of work which has provided much inspiration for my writing of this present essay.
One more supplementary source, this time regarding Kant, which I have also drawn on at some length, and which ought to be mentioned specifically here, is the 1993 Cambridge Edition of Immanuel Kant's "Opus postumum" in English, translated by Eckart Förster (who was also its editor) and Michael Rosen; a book which I have found to be an extremely fruitful source for some of my discussions in this present paper. Förster's thoughtful and thorough introduction to "opus postumum" has been especially useful, and a large part of my discussion of the "Opus" is based on his systematic and concise overview and analysis of this Kant's truly "final work".
One of the main problems in reading and interpreting Peirce's philosophy today is that although he had, as mentioned above, a truly prodigious body of publications by any set of academic standards, many of these were of more technical nature since he mainly made his living and published as a scientist, rather than as a philosopher. His degree which he obtained from Harvard University in 1863 was in chemistry, and he subsequently worked for thirty years for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. He was also associated for a number of years, starting in 1869, with the Harvard Observatory. The one full book that he published, "Photometric Researches" (1878) embodied the results of a series of astronomical observations that he had made there. Max Fisch (1981) mentions in this connection too, that Peirce was amongst other things the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unit of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of "the economy of research". He was, continues Fisch, "the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been both competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences." These were in fact only a few of Peirce's wider scientific (i.e. rather than specifically philosophical) achievements for which he gained considerable recognition in his own lifetime, perhaps especially in Britain and Europe rather than in the United States. Indeed, one of the more influential British proponents of logical positivism during the pre- and post-war periods, Alfred J. Ayer, notes admiringly in the introduction to his book "The Origins of Pragmatism" (Ayer 1968, p. 5) that Peirce was: "... familiar, to an extent that few philosophers are, with the methods and conclusions of the natural sciences and himself engaged in scientific research.", going on to note in the same passage that his own contemporary colleague Carl Popper's then highly renowned theory of scientific method had largely been anticipated by Peirce.
Peirce's philosophical works were, however, only published in a fairly fragmented way before a concerted effort was begun to collate and publish a systematic collection of a large part of his writings in 1931[2]. Prior to this, Peirce's philosophically oriented publications had been mainly limited to a series of five articles that appeared in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1867[3], a series of three articles in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1868-1869[4], a series of six articles in Popular Science Monthly, 1877-1888[5], and two in French in Revue Philosophique de la France et de L'Étranger, 1878-1879[6], as well as a number of contributions to The Nation in the years following his move to Milford, Pennsylvania in 1887. Finally, there was the famous series of five articles which appeared in The Monist between 1891 and 1893. (see footnote 12 below).
In this essay I will focus on and discuss in some more depth one important aspect of Charles Sanders Peirce's lifelong philosophical endeavour, namely his work in the later part of his life to develop a systematic classification of the sciences, which will in turn be seen in relationship to his even larger life-project of developing a general architectonic system of philosophical logic, which Peirce himself often referred to as his Semeiotic. To this end we shall first have a closer look at Peirce's application for funding to the Carnegie Institution of 1902.