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The Genesis of the Peircean Continuum
- Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 43, Number 3, Summer 2007
- pp. 425-469
- Article
- Additional Information
In the Cambridge Conferences Lectures of 1898 Peirce defines a continuum as a "collection of so vast a multitude" that its elements "become welded into one another." He links the transinfinity (the "vast multitude") of a continuum to the confusion of its elements by a line of mathematical reasoning closely related to Cantor's Theorem. I trace the mathematical and philosophical roots of this conception of continuity, and examine its unresolved tensions, which arise mainly from difficulties in Peirce's theory of collections.