[HN Gopher] Peirce Edition Project
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       Peirce Edition Project
        
       Author : rnjailamba
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2025-03-14 06:21 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (peirce.indianapolis.iu.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (peirce.indianapolis.iu.edu)
        
       | jfarmer wrote:
       | Always a pleasant surprise to see Peirce linked here!
       | 
       | He influenced many people, both directly and indirectly, but had
       | a...difficult personality. He has many thousands of pages of
       | written work, but resisted finalizing anything "publishable". His
       | style is (IMO) an extreme example of that dense, meandering,
       | 19th-century Victorian style, which can make for very hard
       | reading.
       | 
       | But he made significant contributions to many fields, from
       | mathematics to experimental physics to logic to (nascent)
       | computer science to philosophy.
       | 
       | This 2019 article from Aeon magazine outlines much of it: _The
       | American Aristotle_ https://aeon.co/essays/charles-sanders-
       | peirce-was-americas-g...
       | 
       | Umberto Eco said: "Charles Sanders Peirce is undoubtedly the
       | greatest unpublished writer of our century." (cf.
       | https://www.jstor.org/stable/2907146)
       | 
       | Cornel West said: "Charles Sanders Peirce is the most profound
       | philosophical thinker produced in America."
       | 
       | For example, Peirce coined the term "fallibilism":
       | 
       | > _For years in the course of this ripening process, I used for
       | myself to collect my ideas under the designation fallibilism; and
       | indeed the first step toward finding out is to acknowledge you do
       | not satisfactorily know already; so that no blight can so surely
       | arrest all intellectual growth as the blight of cocksureness; and
       | ninety-nine out of every hundred good heads are reduced to
       | impotence by that malady -- of whose inroads they are most
       | strangely unaware!_ Collected Papers, SS1.13
       | 
       | He was the first to articulate the type/token distinction. He has
       | truth tables ~40 years before Wittgenstein. He had diagrams of
       | electrical circuits that could do basic logic. He was the first
       | to show (in the 1880s) that NOR and NAND were sufficient to
       | reproduce the other logical connectives.
       | 
       | He was the first to propose tying a standard unit to an absolute
       | measure (in Peirce's case, defining the meter in terms of the
       | wavelength of a spectral line):
       | https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/62/12/39/390647/Ch...
       | 
       | The ideas in the paper where he proposed that were taken up by
       | Michelson and Morley, who credit Peirce in several of their
       | interferometer papers.
        
       | TimorousBestie wrote:
       | I wonder if the project has a fallback plan in the event that
       | their funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities
       | and/or the state of Indiana is reduced or removed. It would be
       | sad to see all this effort go to waste.
        
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