The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition: 1890–1892 (review)

The central philosophical texts of this volume, the “metaphysical” or “cosmological” essays of the early 1890s published in The Monist, have long been a source of enjoyable controversy for Peirce scholars. From the reasonably straightforward arguments of “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined” to the wild and fascinating speculative suggestions in “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce marks out the transitional ideas of his mid-career. Whether one sees, as I do, a continuity among these essays and their predecessors and followers, or whether one reads them as idiosyncratic efforts of a midlife Peirce, one is compelled to wrestle with their meaning. This alone makes the reading of Volume 8 of the Chronological Edition an exhilarating experience. But there is much more.

To begin, Nathan Houser has written an excellent and subtle introduction. Houser’s years of experience with Peirce’s manuscripts and texts are brought to bear not only in interpreting what Peirce explicitly wrote but also in grasping Peirce’s philosophical orientation and personal conditions of the early years of the 1890s. Houser recounts Peirce’s separation from the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, his turn to writing reviews and essays as a source of income, his early years in Milford, as well as Peirce’s role in the Abbot-Royce affair, his ongoing work in logic and mathematics, and his existential consideration of religion in the face of his impending poverty. Most importantly, Houser carefully details what the texts of the volume then document—that Peirce’s life situation and writings were mutually influencing and that his work across disciplines was conducted in such a way as to weave his various studies into a reasonably coherent story. In my view this is the best piece of historical writing about Peirce in the last thirty years.

The texts—most from between 1890 and 1892—cover a ridiculously rich range of materials. The opening “Familiar Letters about the Art of Reasoning” presents an introduction to inference and reasoning through card tricks. It is highly reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic. Throughout the volume Peirce foreshadows the metaphysical essays that were to appear in The Monist. In “The Non-Euclidean Geometry Made Easy,” Peirce unsettles our sense of certainty arising from a priori claims. In this instance our so-called “natural” notion of space is brought into question through an example of a line and a point in the same plane, in which we “naturally” suppose there is one line through the point that is parallel to the line and an infinity of lines through the point that necessarily intersect the line. “If there is some influence in evolution tending to adapt the mind to nature,” Peirce argues, “it would probably not be completed yet. And we find other natural ideas require correction. Why not this, too? Thus, there is some reason to think this natural idea is not exact” (26). In “Sketch of a New Philosophy,” we find Peirce drawing on the work of Darwin and Adam Smith, on his studies of chance and probability, and on his considerations of continuity to hypothesize the developmental nature of natural laws, the growth of cultural habits, and the nature of matter as “effete mind” (21–22). In several of the essays, Peirce begins to develop his well-known claim that all good reasoning is diagrammatic. The key upshot for the metaphysical essays is that traditional deductive or geometric philosophies fail to note that creative deductive inference involves diagrams and thus a kind of inductive process that entails rejecting the “necessity” of outcomes in reasoning and in the cosmos. Thus, for Peirce, evolution became a leading idea for all philosophical inquiry; but this evolution involved growth and development not, as for Spencer, the mechanical unfolding of an initial principle. The laws of nature, Peirce argued, are “not absolutely rigid” (21), and the instinctive, a priori “laws” of inquiry are not “exactly true” (242).

Although Peirce used the Monist essays...