ABSTRACT
In fall 1903 Peirce delivered a series of lectures on “Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed” at the Lowell Institute in Boston. A printed syllabus, titled A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic, was handed out during the fourth lecture on December 3, 1903. The surviving copies of this pamphlet 1 contain three main sections:
An Outline Classification of the Sciences
The Ethics of Terminology
Existential Graphs
Nearly half of the printed version of the Syllabus was devoted to Existential Graphs, which were Peirce’s focus in the lectures. The classification of the sciences and the ethics of terminology were not directly addressed in the lectures, but they somehow provide the epistemological and the methodological background of what was delivered in the lectures. What is conspicuously missing in the printed Syllabus is Peirce’s theory of speculative grammar, which remained in manuscript form.