Charles Sanders Peirce was born in September 1839 and died five months before the guns of August 1914. He is perhaps the most important mind the United States has ever produced. He made significant contributions throughout his life as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, engineer, and inventor. He was a psychologist, a philologist, a lexicographer, a historian of science, a lifelong student of medicine, and, above all, a philosopher, whose special fields were logic and semiotics. He is (...) widely credited with being the founder of pragmatism. In terms of his importance as a philosopher and a scientist, he has been compared to Plato and Aristotle. He himself intended "to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle." Peirce was also a tormented and in many ways tragic figure. He suffered throughout his life from various ailments, including a painful facial neuralgia, and had wide swings of mood which frequently left him depressed to the state of inertia, and other times found him explosively violent. Despite his consistent belief that ideas could find meaning only if they "worked" in the world, he himself found it almost impossible to make satisfactory economic and social arrangements for himself. This brilliant scientist, this great philosopher, this astounding polymath was never able, throughout his long life, to find an academic post that would allow him to pursue his major interest, the study of logic, and thus also fulfill his destiny as America's greatest philosopher. Much of his work remained unpublished in his own time, and is only now finding publication in a coherent, chronologically organized edition. Even more astounding is that,despite many monographic studies, there has been no biography until now, almost eighty years after his death. Brent has studied the Peirce papers in detail and enriches his account with numerous quotations from letters by Peirce and by his friends. This is a fascinating account of a p. (shrink)

We distinguish scanning switches, which only enumerate states, from function switches which transform input states into output states. For the latter we introduce a logical network symbolism. Our history of early computer switching begins with the suggestions of Ramon Lull and Gottfried Leibniz, surveys the evolution of mechanical scanning switches and the first mechanical function switches, and then describes the first electromechanical function switches. The main themes of the present paper are that William S. Jevons built the first substantial function (...) switch (his logical piano), and that his work led to the design by Allan Marquand of the first substantial electromechanical function switch, as well as to Charles S. Peirce's idea for an electrical general-purpose programmable computer. These events all occurred fifty years before the first general-purpose programmable computers were constructed (in the 1940's), but they had no influence. (shrink)

Die von Jens Timmermann besorgte Neuausgabe innerhalb der Philosophischen Bibliothek bietet den vollständigen Wortlaut der beiden Originalausgaben von 1781 und 1787. Der Kantische Text wurde unter Wahrung der Interpunktion und sprachlicher Eigenheiten sehr behutsam an die heutigen orthographischen Regeln angeglichen. Die semantisch bedeutenden Korrekturvorschläge späterer Herausgeber (nicht nur der Akademie-Ausgabe) sind, wo sie nicht in den Text Aufnahme gefunden haben, am Fuß der Seite verzeichnet. Alle wesentlichen Unterschiede zwischen den Originalausgaben sind durch Kursivdruck hervorgehoben, größere Abweichungen ganzer Textstücke - etwa (...) in der Einleitung und im Kapitel über Phaenomena und Noumena - wurden synoptisch gegenübergestellt, so daß Art und Umfang der Umarbeitung unmittelbar abgelesen werden können. Die durchgängig neu bearbeitete Studienausgabe folgt in den Grundprinzipien der seit 1926 in Forschung und Lehre maßgeblichen Ausgabe von Raymund Schmidt, die hiermit abgelöst wird. Sie wird ergänzt durch eine umfangreiche Bibliographie von Heiner Klemme sowie durch einen ausführlichen Personen- und Sachindex. (shrink)

1 INTRODUCTION Above the other titles he might justly have claimed, Charles S. Peirce prized the title 'logician'. He expressed in several places his ...

One task of logic, Peirce held, is to classify arguments so as to determine the validity of each kind. His own classification is interesting because it includes a novel type of argument in addition to the two traditionally recognized types. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss what Peirce thought to be sufficiently distinctive about abduction to warrant calling it a new kind of argument. But since one finds in his writings on abduction a number of different views (...) it is first necessary to make a few remarks concerning the unity of Peirce's thought. (shrink)

Concepts and problems; The calculus of inductive probability; Alternative inductive logics and the justification of induction; Probability and action; The pragmatic theory of inductive probability; The logic of causal statements as a formal language; The logic of causal statements as a model of natural language; The dispositional theory of empirical probability; Cause and chance in space - time systems; The presupposition of theory induction; Chance, cause, and reason.