Online research in philosophy

Few philosophers today know much about Charles Peirce’s metaphysics, although a great many know something about his epistemology, philosophy of science, and logic. Indeed, few Peirce experts have written much on his metaphysics or made it the focus of their research. To an extent, this is understandable. Peirce’s writings were left in a disastrously disorganized state (mostly unpublished), and the crucial papers on metaphysics from his later years have not yet been republished in the first-rate chronological edition, the incomplete Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition , edited at Indianapolis by my friends. And then there is Peirce’s writing: an awkward, abrasive, arrogant, eclectic style that demands technical knowledge in diverse fields, especially logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences. His worst personality traits manifested themselves in his highly technical metaphysics—with its idiosyncratic, anti-Cantorian conception of continua, a pecularly mathematical phenomenology, and elaborate views on Darwinian and non-Darwinian evolution, for example. Finally, there is what might appear to be the bizarreness of the theory itself, as we shall see. Peirce was a kind of philosophical swashbuckler, a bold, courageous speculator on philosophical questions beyond most of our temperaments even to ponder. Ours is not the philosophical age of Errol Flynn but the minimalist age of Harrison Ford, with no grand gestures or speeches, just a series of small, no-nonsense gestures: we typically like our philosophy short, neat, "science-like," and isolated from other philosophical issues.

The central philosophical texts of this volume, the “metaphysical” or “cosmological” essays of the early 1890s published in The Monist, have long been a source of enjoyable controversy for Peirce scholars. From the reasonably straightforward arguments of “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” to the wild and fascinating speculative suggestions in “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce marks out the transitional ideas of his mid-career. Whether one sees, as I do, a continuity among these essays and their predecessors and followers, or whether one reads them as idiosyncratic efforts of a midlife Peirce, one is compelled to wrestle with their meaning. This alone makes the reading of Volume 8 of the Chronological Edition an ..

A classical Deweyan look at the philosophy of C.S. Peirce--written before the availability of the Harvard edition of Peirce's writings.

Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A chronological edition, volume 4, 1879?1884. Editor [in Chiefl, Christian J. W. Kloesel. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. lxx + 698 pp. $57.50.

: The Cuddeback Letter Book contains approximately two-hundred letters sent to Charles Peirce between 1859 and 1861. In the front of the book Peirce compiled a list of sixty-one correspondents. Many of them are key figures in Peirce's life, and the Cuddeback has long been recognized as an important source for biographical research. However, some years ago the owner of the Cuddeback blocked scholarly access because of its fragile condition, among other reasons. Fortunately, the Cuddeback has recently been conserved and a digital image of each sheet has been made. This recent development is described below. Scholarly research on this area of Peirce's biography may now resume.