ABSTRACT
Peirce was the second and favored son of a prominent father (Benjamin Peirce), born into the intellectual capital of the United States in the nineteenth century. He was a child of privilege who in terms of worldly success squandered many of his inherited advantages. Especially in his later years, however, Peirce exempli…ed nothing less than intellectual heroism, devoting himself indefatigably (without much of an audience and with little hope of a publisher) to work on a variety of topics, including cosmology, pragmatism, semeiotics (or the theory of signs), and most of all logic. The scienti…cally trained philosopher was, until the end, a philosophically speculative experimentalist who devoted himself to nothing less than offering a guess at the riddle of the Sphinx, that is, the enigma of the universe. We obtain a sense of the household in which this experimentalist was reared by recalling what he wrote years later in retrospect:
My father was universally acknowledged to be by far the strongest mathematician in the country, and was a man of great intellect and weight of character. All the leading men of science, particularly astronomers and physicists, resorted to our house [in Cambridge, on the edge of Harvard College]; so that I was brought up in an atmosphere of science.
