biography
| name: |
Peirce, Charles Sanders
|
pronunciation:
[peers]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1839–1914)
|
| biography:
| Philosopher, logician, and mathematician, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He was the son of Harvard mathematics professor, Benjamin Peirce, and although his father early cultivated his intellectual abilities and he was obviously brilliant, he did not do all that well at Harvard. After a temporary post with the US Coast Survey (1859), he remained associated with it for 30 years (1861–91). He performed important experiments with the pendulum, and contributed to gravity theory, the use of the wavelength of light as a standard unit of measure, and to conformal map projections. He also lectured at Harvard (1864–5, 1869–70) and Johns Hopkins (1879–84), but his difficult presentations appealed only to the brightest students. Highly temperamental, careless in dress, and unsociable to an extreme, he was divorced in 1883. When he inherited some money he retired (1887) to an isolated part of Pennsylvania, spending his time writing down his diverse and complex ideas. In his later years he turned to writing book reviews and encyclopedia entries to support himself. During his lifetime he published only one book, Photometric Researches (1879), but he produced a prodigious number of papers; his works were collected and published in eight volumes (1931–58). Not a systematic philosopher, he ranged over an incredible variety of topics, and single-handedly anticipated several of the main currents of modern logic, mathematics, and philosophy. He developed the work of the 19th-c Englishman, George Boole, to help lay the foundation of the logical basis of modern mathematics, and set forth ideas since regarded as the beginning of semiotics, the study of the use of signs and symbols. He is probably best known as one of the founders of pragmatism, the quintessentially American school of philosophy – the idea that the real value of any idea lies in its practical effects, its real consequences. Little known and less understood in his day, he has come to be recognized as one of the most important of all American thinkers. |
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