Charles Sanders Peirce was a strikingly original American
Philosopher. Peirce began his career as a physicist. His
experiments with pendulums contributed to the determination of
the density and shape of the earth. He also worked on the
measurement of light waves. In his late twenties he undertook a
study of formal logic (especially the new mathematical logic of
George Boole.) For the next twenty years he lectured on
philosophy and logic at Harvard and John's Hopkin's
Universities. Peirce is best known for initiating an original
philosophical system, which is now known as pragmatism. One of
Peirce's earliest assertions of pragmatism is developed in his
article,The Fixation of Belief, which was published in Popular
Science Monthly 12 (November 1877), 1-15. It is important to
recognize that the ideas and issues being probed by the
philosophers we will investigate are complex and problematic.
The approach we are taking to philosophy in InterQuest is not a
matter of learning a list of facts or proceedures. The pri