Peirce summary

Peirce summary

Charles Peirce was born into academia.   His father, Benjamin Peirce, was a mathematics professor at Harvard who conducted important work in associative algebras and number theory.   With this advantage, the young Peirce developed an interest in logic at a young age.   In 1863, at the height of the Civil War(or The War to Prevent Southern Independence,) Harvard awarded Peirce it’s first Master’s degree in Chemistry.   This is where his story gets interesting; Peirce sympathized with the Confederacy according to several sources.   In order to avoid conscription of either himself or a stand in, as was legal at the time, Peirce worked for one of the oldest government agencies in our nation, the United States’ Coast Survey.

While he was working at the Coast Survey from 1859-1891, he went on five government subsidized trips to Europe.   His jobs were often tedious sinecures supposedly necessary to find aberrations in the Earth’s gravity and the like.   Nevertheless, in 1876, he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, which had been chartered by Abraham Lincoln, via an election.   He also was a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in the 1880s but was unable to secure tenure possibly because he had an extra-marital affair legally after his first wife had left him without a finalized divorce.  

Following the death of his father in the 1880, Peirce’s performance at the Coast Survey declined.   It is difficult to give a precise reason for his lack of output.   However, he began publishing philosophical papers on science and logic at a remarkable rate and his hebetude at the Coast Survey coincides directly with his tremendous output in philosophy.   As the wikipedia article on Peirce states as of January 2nd, “Peirce’s indifference to bureaucratic detail waxed while the quality and timeliness of his Survey work waned.” Eventually, he resigned from the Coast Survey in 1891 and retired in relative poverty to a Pennsylvania farm, which he called Arisbe...