"he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever"
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
Figure timeline
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, writing in 1934, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote in 1959, "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth ce…
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
science · American scientist (1839–1914) · mathematician · philosopher · logician · statistician · university teacher · linguist · surveyor · physicist · also Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Sanders Santiago Peirce, CSP, Peirce
Born 10 September 1839 · Died 19 April 1914 · Q187520
47 published statements · 0 followers
See & hear
Photos & media
9 photos · 1 audio
Listen
En-us-purse
Media from Wikimedia Commons, hotlinked at the source under its own licence — see each file for author and terms.
Live now
In the news
Pulling headlines from trusted outlets — this usually takes a few seconds
Checking the wires…
Feed scan
These are live links, not archived citations — they only join the timeline once a collect run verifies and archives them.
Live pulse
Recent highlights
Most recent outstanding titles, awards, and quotes
- Quote
- Quote
1959· 1 entry
1949· 1 entry
While doing unrelated archival work, the historian of mathematics Carolyn Eisele (1902–2000) chanced on an autograph letter by Peirce
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1940· 2 entries
Alfred Tarski and his students rediscovered aspects of Peirce's larger vision of relational logic, developing the perspective of relation algebra
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1957, 1958, 1972, 1994, and 2009, most still in print
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1934· 2 entries
Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician"
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot arranged for Juliette's burial in Milford Cemetery
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1924· 1 entry
Was struck by how Peirce had anticipated his own "process" thinking
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1914· 3 entries
Died 1914-04-19.
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikidata
- #death
“It has never been in my power to study anything, — mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic.”
- #wikiquote
- #saying
- #undated
- #lang:en
- #lang:pt
- #multi-edition
“The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.”
- #wikiquote
- #saying
- #undated
- #lang:en
1910· 1 entry
James wrote to his friends in the Boston intelligentsia to request financial aid for Peirce; the fund continued even after James died
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1908· 3 entries
“A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”
- #wikiquote
- #quote
“It is on 26 May 1908, that Peirce finally gave up his idea that in every continuum there is room for whatever collection of any multitude. From now on, there are different kinds of continua, which have different properties.”
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #quote
Peirce wrote that he found that a true continuum might have or lack such room
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1905· 1 entry
Peirce coined the new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition", saying that "all went happily" with James's and F
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1903· 3 entries
Presented the following logical form for abductive inference:
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
Arranged them, from more to less theoretically basic, thus:
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
Peirce called pragmatism "the logic of abduction"
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1902· 1 entry
To the newly formed Carnegie Institution for a grant to write a systematic book describing his life's work
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1901· 2 entries
To the Earth ellipsoid proposed by Friedrich Robert Helmert, whose parameter values were remarkably close to reality
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
“s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901–1905); half of those credited to him appear to have been written actually by Christine Ladd-Franklin under his supervision. He applied in 1902 to the newly formed Carnegie Institution for a grant to write a systematic book describing his life”
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #quote
1893· 1 entry
Peirce restated most of it for a less advanced audience
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1891· 1 entry
Peirce resigned from the Coast Survey at Superintendent Thomas Corwin Mendenhall's request
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1888· 1 entry
President Grover Cleveland appointed him to the Assay Commission
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1887· 1 entry
Peirce spent part of his inheritance from his parents to buy 2,000 acres (8 km2) of rural land near Milford, Pennsylvania, which never yielded an economic return
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1886· 1 entry
Saw that Boolean calculations could be carried out via electrical switches, anticipating Claude Shannon by more than 50 years
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1885· 3 entries
Distinguished between first-order and second-order quantification
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
“On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation”
- #wikiquote
- #quote
An investigation by the Allison Commission exonerated Peirce, but led to the dismissal of Superintendent Julius Hilgard and several other Coast Survey employees for misuse of public funds
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1883· 2 entries
In "A Theory of Probable Inference" (Studies in Logic), Peirce equated hypothetical inference with the induction of characters of objects (as he had done in effect before)
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
“A Theory of Probable Inference”
- #wikiquote
- #quote
1881· 1 entry
Set out the axiomatization of natural number arithmetic, a few years before Richard Dedekind and Giuseppe Peano
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1879· 2 entries
Peirce was appointed lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University, which had strong departments in areas that interested him, such as philosophy (Royce and Dewey completed their PhDs at Hopkins), psychology (taught by G
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
Peirce developed Peirce quincuncial projection, having been inspired by H
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1878· 2 entries
“Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis”
- #wikiquote
- #quote
Was renamed the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, where he enjoyed his highly influential father's protection until the latter's death in 1880
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1877· 3 entries
Was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
“Illustrations of the Logic of Science”
- #wikiquote
- #quote
Proposed measuring the meter as so many wavelengths of light of a certain frequency, the kind of definition employed from 1960 to 1983 and since 2019
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1875· 2 entries
Peirce, while still legally married, became involved with Juliette, whose last name, given variously as Froissy and Pourtalai, and nationality (she spoke French) remain uncertain
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
Peirce conducted experiments at the Geneva Observatory with his reversible pendulum, and commissioned the Société genevoise d'instruments physiques in Plainpalais a vacuum chamber for his pendulum
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1872· 1 entry
Founded the Metaphysical Club, a conversational philosophical club that Peirce, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1870· 1 entry
Returning in 1871, as part of a group sent to observe a solar eclipse that was to take place on December 22, 1870
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1867· 1 entry
The 27-year-old Peirce presented a paper entitled "On a New List of Categories" to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which published it the following year
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1863· 1 entry
The Lawrence Scientific School awarded him a Bachelor of Science degree, Harvard's first summa cum laude chemistry degree
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1860· 1 entry
Suggested a cardinal arithmetic for infinite numbers, years before any work by Georg Cantor (who completed his dissertation in 1867) and without access to Bernard Bolzano's 1851 (posthumous) Paradoxien des Unendlichen
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikipedia
- #event
1839· 1 entry
Born 1839-09-10.
Text from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- #wikidata
- #birth