In the winter of 1891, Charles Sanders Peirce sat in a farmhouse in Milford, Pennsylvania, and wrote a letter to William James asking for money. It was not the first such letter, and it would not be the last. Peirce had been dismissed from Johns Hopkins University a decade earlier following a personal scandal and had never held another academic post. He and his wife, Juliette, were living in a house they could not afford to heat, surviving on the generosity of friends and the occasional lecture fee that James and others managed to arrange for him. Peirce spent his days writing philosophy of extraordinary originality and ambition in notebooks that no journal would publish and no university would read, working through problems in logic, semiotics, and metaphysics that his contemporaries largely ignored and that scholars are still working through today. James, who understood better than almost anyone what Peirce had done and was doing, sent money when he could and spent years trying to secure him a position, a stipend, anything that might give the most original philosophical mind in America the stability to work. The efforts repeatedly failed. Peirce died in 1914, in that same farmhouse, leaving behind an archive so vast and so complex that Harvard acquired it in boxes and has been organizing it ever since.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was a polymath whose interests spanned philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, and language, and whose influence on modern thought runs far deeper than his name recognition would suggest. Best known as the father of pragmatism, the only major philosophical movement to originate in the United States, Peirce developed a principle that the usefulness, workability, and practicality of ideas are the criteria of their merit, a conviction that reshaped how philosophy understood truth, inquiry, and the relationship between thought and action. Yet pragmatism was only one thread in a philosophical project of remarkable scope, encompassing a theory of signs, a system of categories, and a metaphysics of evolution and chance that anticipated debates still unresolved in contemporary philosophy.
To engage with that project in its full complexity requires a guide who has spent years inside it. Rosa Mayorga, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Miami Dade College and the author of From Realism to 'Realicism': The Metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce, brings to this conversation both deep scholarly knowledge and a genuine feel for what makes Peirce not merely historically significant but philosophically alive.
In the conversation that follows, Mayorga illuminates the life and work of a thinker who founded an entire philosophical tradition while borrowing money to keep warm, and whose ideas, neglected in his lifetime, continue to reward the closest attention that philosophy can give them.
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