The Rule of Reason: The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce

Evan Simpson, a philosophy professor, is Dean of Humanities, McMaster
University and the editor of Anti-foundationalism and Practical
Reasoning: Conversations between Hermeneutics and Analysis.

C.S. Peirce is widely regarded today as the most important of all
American philosophers. He is recognized as the founder of pragmatism and
several successive philosophical systems. These systems include
contributions to the full range of philosophical theory, especially
logic, epistemology, and conceptions of meaning. Peirce’s depth and
creativity are reflected in his technical vocabulary, which probably
limited the influence of his work on his contemporaries and can still
pose initial problems of accessibility. Uninitiated readers will
probably find many of the specialized studies in The Rule of Reason
difficult going.

Most of the book’s 14 studies were originally presented at a
conference on Peirce’s work held at the University of Toronto in the
fall of 1992. Like Peirce’s own interests, their cumulative scope is
broad. There are studies of statistical methods and inference, the
graphical analysis of logical structure, and anticipations of possible
world semantics; papers that explore the ability of the pragmatic method
to reconcile realism and idealism, materialism and dualism, theism and
scientism, feeling and cognition, and other apparent philosophical
dichotomies; and accounts of the role of sentiment in Peirce’s
conception of objective and scientific inquiry, the impact of science on
ethics and politics, and the importance of language for
self-consciousness.

Unfortunately, there is no index, and the editors’ introduction could
have been more thorough and synthesizing. Nevertheless, specialists will
find that the collection fulfils its objective of clarifying some
outstanding issues and difficulties in Peirce’s thinking. Others will
at least gain appreciation of Peirce’s “first rule of
reason”—that “in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in
so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think.”