Chance, Love and Logic: Philosophical Essays

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In the essays gathered together in this volume we have the most developed and coherent available account of the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, whom James, Royce, Dewey, and leading thinkers in England, France, Germany and Italy have placed in the forefront of the great seminal minds of recent times. Besides their inherent value as the expression of a highly original and fruitful mind, unusually well trained and informed in the exact sciences, these essays are also important as giving us the sources of a great deal of contemporary American philosophy.

Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism. In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician".

An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and foremost, a logician. He made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology and philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits; the same idea as was used decades later to produce digital computers.

Peirce was a working scientist for 30 years, and arguably was a professional philosopher only during the five years he lectured at Johns Hopkins. He learned philosophy mainly by reading, each day, a few pages of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, in the original German, while a Harvard undergraduate. His writings bear on a wide array of disciplines, including mathematics, logic, philosophy, statistics, astronomy, metrology, geodesy, experimental psychology, economics, linguistics, and the history and philosophy of science. This work has enjoyed renewed interest and approval, a revival inspired not only by his anticipations of recent scientific developments but also by his demonstration of how philosophy can be applied effectively to human problems.

Peirce's philosophy includes a pervasive three-category system, belief that truth is immutable and is both independent from actual opinion and discoverable , logic as formal semiotic on signs, on arguments, and on inquiry's ways—including philosophical pragmatism , critical common-sensism, and scientific method—and, in metaphysics: Scholastic realism, belief in God, freedom, and at least an attenuated immortality, objective idealism, and belief in the reality of continuity and of absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and creative love. In his work, fallibilism and pragmatism may seem to work somewhat like skepticism and positivism, respectively, in others' work. However, for Peirce, fallibilism is balanced by an anti-skepticism and is a basis for belief in the reality of absolute chance and of continuity, and pragmatism commits one to anti-nominalist belief in the reality of the general.

For Peirce, First Philosophy, which he also called cenoscopy, is less basic than mathematics and more basic than the special sciences . It studies positive phenomena in general, phenomena available to any person at any waking moment, and does not settle questions by resorting to special experiences. He divided such philosophy into phenomenology , normative sciences , and metaphysics.