Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Peirce was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1839. He graduated from Harvard College and in 1863 received a degree in chemistry for the Lawrence Scientific School, where he met WilliamJames.

In 1861 he began working for the United States Coastal Survey, a government scientific agency.

From 1879 to 1884 he was a Lecturer in Logic at John Hopkins University, where John Dewey was a graduate student. His contract with Hopkins was not renewed because of a scandal involving his divorce and remarriage.

In 1891 he was force to resign from the Coastal Survey. After the failure of a number of business ventures, he retired to Arisbe, his home in Milford, Pennsyvania, where he spent his last years in poverty and illness, supported in part by the charity of James and producing an enormous quantity of unfinished and unpublished manuscripts.

He died of cancer in 1914.

-- bio excerpt from Pragmatism, A Reader by Louis Menand, ISBN 0679775447 .

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