A clear and thorough account of Peirce's life and thought, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to this important and complex thinker.

A student's guide to the historical context, key thinkers and central themes of pragmatism, a concept central to American philosophy.

No reasonable person would deny that the sound of a falling pin is less intense than the feeling of a hot poker pressed against the skin, or that the recollection of something seen decades earlier is less vivid than beholding it in the present. Yet John Locke is quick to dismiss a blind man's report that the color scarlet is like the sound of a trumpet, and Thomas Nagel similarly avers that such loose intermodal analogies are of little use in developing an objective phenomenology. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), by striking contrast, maintains rather that the blind man is correct. Peirce's reasoning stems from his phenomenology, which has received little attention as compared with his logic, pragmatism, or semiotics. Peirce argues that one can describe the similarities and differences between such experiences as seeing a scarlet red and hearing a trumpet's blare or hearing a falling pin and feeling a hot poker. Drawing on the Kantian idea that the analysis of consciousness should take as its guide formal logic, Peirce contends that we can construct a table of the elements of consciousness, just as Dmitri Mendeleev constructed a table of the chemical elements. By showing that the elements of consciousness fall into distinct classes, Peirce makes significant headway in developing the very sort of objective phenomenology which vindicates the studious blind man Locke so derides. Charles S. Peirce's Phenomenology shows how his phenomenology rests on his logic, gives an account of Peirce's phenomenology as science, and then shows how his work can be used to develop an objective phenomenological vocabulary. Ultimately, Richard Kenneth Atkins shows how Peirce's pioneering and distinctive formal logic led him to a phenomenology that addresses many of the questions philosophers of mind continue to raise today.

Praised by Bertrand Russell as “one of the most original minds” and “certainly the greatest American thinker ever,” Charles Sanders Peirce invented “pragmaticism.” Vulgarized by William James and others, Peirce’s revolutionary semiotic recognizes chance, fortuitous happenings, serendipity, in understanding lawful paradigm-shifts in history. Peirce’s thought envisions a process-oriented community of inquirers engaged in confronting urgent social problems by clarifying the groundwork of meanings, beliefs, purposes, ideologies. E. San Juan’s project seeks to excavate the radical resonance of Peirce’s desire for “concrete reasonableness,” an ideal realized in the philosopher’s endeavor to fuse scientific theory and collective praxis, nature and the universal human potential still chained in alienated labor. Peirce’s hypothesis of transforming the conduct of our lives remains not only to be analyzed and interpreted further but also tested in actual practice by future generations of inquirers and activists.

Widely praised as a founder of modern semiotics and of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) spent over forty years developing a philosophical system that addresses the fundamental problems of Western metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Although never formally completed, what emerges from Peirce’s writings is a distinctive system, through an innovative semiotic or theory of signs and cognition, that combines with a robustly realist metaphysics that emphasizes the mind-independence of laws and other universals. Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality explains this marriage of empiricism with realism by tracing the roots of Peirce’s thought in the history of Western philosophy, with particular attention paid to his predecessors in the empiricist and the common sense traditions. By purging modern empiricism of its nominalistic metaphysics and its Cartesian assumptions about mind and knowledge, and by combining it with insights from sources as diverse as Duns Scotus and Charles Darwin, Peirce reinvents the idea that all our knowledge depends on sense perception while reaffirming the place of philosophy as a foundational field of inquiry. In Peirce’s Empiricism, Aaron Bruce Wilson defends an interpretation of Peirce’s philosophical work as forming a systematic whole, and develops the connections between Peirce, Reid, and the British empiricists. Wilson provides focused analyses of Peirce’s accounts of experience, habit, perception, semeiosis, truth, and ultimate ends. This book will be of great value to students and scholars with interests in Peirce, American philosophy more broadly, modern philosophy, and semiotics.

Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious developmental account of Peirce’s theory of speculative grammar. The book traces the evolution of Peirce’s grammatical writings from his early research on the classification of arguments in the 1860s up to the complex semiotic taxonomies elaborated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It will be of interest to academic specialists working on Peirce, the history of American philosophy and pragmatism, the philosophy of language, the history of logic, and semiotics.

This Companion provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to. The book offers both historical and systematic treatments of these issues, as well as addressing their contemporary relevance. Structured in three parts – Modes and Schools of Historical Thought, Epistemology and Metaphysics of History, and Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory – it offers the reader a wide scope and expert treatment of each topic in this vibrant field that can be read in any order. An international team of experts both discuss the basis of their topic and present their own view, offering the reader a cutting-edge contribution while ensuring their chapters are of interest to both students and specialists in the field of historical theory and engaging with the very nature of historical thought, the metaphysics of historical existence, the politics of history-writing, and the intelligibility of the historical process. The volume is an indispensable companion to the study of history and essential reading for anyone interested in the reflection on the nature of history and our historical existence.

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection is a timely overview of the methodological developments available to social science researchers, covering key themes including: Concepts, Contexts, Basics Verbal Data Digital and Internet Data Triangulation and Mixed Methods Collecting Data in Specific Populations.

Do brains create material reality in thinking processes or is it the other way around, with things shaping the mind? Where is the location of meaning-making? How do neural networks become established by means of multimodal pattern replications, and how are they involved in conceptualization? How are resonance textures within cellular entities extended in the body and the mind by means of mirroring processes? In which ways do they correlate to consciousness and self-consciousness? Is it possible to explain out-of-awareness unconscious processes? What holds together the relationship between experiential reality, bodily processes like memory, reason, or imagination, and sign-systems and simulation structures like metaphor and metonymy visible in human language? This volume attempts to answer some of these questions.

The Routledge Companion to Pragmatism offers 44 cutting-edge chapters—written specifically for this volume by an international team of distinguished researchers—that assess the past, present, and future of pragmatism. Going beyond the exposition of canonical texts and figures, the collection presents pragmatism as a living philosophical idiom that continues to devise promising theses in contemporary debates. The chapters are organized into four major parts: Pragmatism’s history and figures Pragmatism and plural traditions Pragmatism’s reach Pragmatism’s relevance Each chapter provides up-to-date research tools for philosophers, students, and others who wish to locate pragmatist options in their contemporary research fields. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that the vitality of pragmatism lies in its ability to build upon, and transcend, the ideas and arguments of its founders. When seen in its full diversity, pragmatism emerges as one of the most successful and influential philosophical movements in Western philosophy.