Thompson, Manley. The Pragmatic Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Abstract

Charles Sanders Peirce has been widely acclaimed as America's greatest native philosopher. His greatest aspiration was to outline a philosophy so comprehensive that the work of all scientists and philosophers "shall appear as the filling up of details." C. S. Peirce never lived to harvest the fruits of his labor, and it was left to posterity to synthesize his philosophy from his numerous articles and unfinished manuscripts. The present volume undertakes a systematic construction of Peirce's philosophy and, guided by his own extensive comments on his work, shows how the word "pragmatism," which he coined, is appropriately applied to the whole of his philosophy. The commentary examines Peirce's attempts to avoid the difficulties he came to recognize in his early writings and traces the gradual development of his final views. The last chapter considers Peirce's pragmatic philosophy in relation to the older philosophies which it purports to overthrow. Peirce believed that the only alternative to his pragmatism was the philosophy based on the traditional logic of Aristotle and Kant, as opposed to the modern symbolic logic which Peirce himself helped develop. In this book, for the first time, the claims Peirce made for his new philosophy are subjected to a searching examination which, while critical, allows him to speak for himself, without being subjected to conformity with some preconceived standard of positivism or naturalism. The result is a commentary which will be of considerable value to philosophers of every persuasion, as well as to all students of C. S. Peirce and his work.