Charles S. Peirce

Abstract

In recent years, Charles Sanders Peirce has emerged as one of America's major philosophical thinkers. His work has invited philosophical reflection about those basic issues that inevitably confront us as human beings, especially in an age of science. Peirce's concern for experience, for what is actually encountered, means that his philosophy forms a reflective commentary on actual life and on the world in which it is lived. This book argues that Peirce's doctrine of the normative sciences is essential to his pragmatism. No part of Peirce's philosophy is bolder than his attempt to establish esthetics, ethics, and logic as the three normative sciences and to argue for the priority of esthetics among the trio. The book shows that Pierce took seriously the trinity of normative sciences and demonstrates that these categories apply both to the conduct of man and to the workings of the cosmos. It combines sympathetic and informed exposition with straightforward criticism and deals with the gaps and inconsistencies in Peirce's thought. It shows that Peirce was above all a cosmological and ontological thinker, one who combined science both as a method and as result with a conception of reasonable actions to form a comprehensive theory of reality. Peirce's pragmatism, is not a glorification of action but rather a theory of the dynamic nature of things in which the “ideal” dimension of reality has genuine power for directing the cosmic order, including man, toward reasonable goals.