Charles S. Peirce's New England Neighbors and Embrace of Transcendentalism

The American philosopher and founder of pragmatism, Charles S. Peirce, famously remarks that he was reared in Cambridge, "the neighborhood of Concord," and that the "truth is I am a sort of … New England Transcendentalist." Investigating Peirce's early life in the mid-nineteenth century, we learn that he and his family had personal connections to many Transcendentalists and their peers, such as Emerson, Fuller, Hedge, and Henry James, Sr. This intellectual "neighborhood" would have a profound impact on Peirce's mature architectonic philosophy, especially his metaphysics. Moreover, his scattered remarks in his extant writings on Transcendentalism show that over the course of his career he came to gradually appreciate Transcendentalist ideas and to ultimately embrace the formative impact of his New England philosophical heritage.