Charles Sanders Peirce (Enlarged Edition), Revised and Enlarged Edition: A Life

"[Brent] has produced a thoughtful, sometimes moving, and entirely accessible intellectual biography which is also, under the circumstances, indispensable." — The New York Review of Books

"... a fine biography." — The New York Times Book Review

"... an extraordinary, inspiring portrait of the largely forgotten Peirce, a progenitor of modern thought who devised a realist metaphysics and attempted to achieve direct knowledge of God by applying the logic of science." — Publishers Weekly

In this expanded paperback edition of the critically acclaimed biography of a true American original, the philosopher-polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, Joseph Brent refines his interpretation of Peirce's thought and character based on new research, and has added a glossary and a detailed chronology.

Publishers Weekly

Having published eight books on C.S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism, Ketner is an acknowledged authority on the man as well as a true believer. The collected papers of Peirce (pronounced Purse) were published in multivolume editions, but Peirce never wrote an autobiography. To make up for this omission, Ketner has begun to write one for him in the first of three planned volumes. To produce this work of literary nonfiction, Ketner has inserted imagined speeches by Peirce and passages from Peirce's letters and philosophic writings where he "waxed autobiographical." To move the story along, Ketner introduces a narrator and two other fictional characters who function as intellectual detectives, separating genuine revelations from bogus ones. Their sleuthing may be helped or hindered by the fact that the narrator believes he is possessed by the spirit of Peirce. The reader is therefore confronted by a real author (Ketner), a dead subject (Peirce), fictional characters and reconstructed and imagined events. Using this convention, Ketner is able to make Peirce more immediate, and he weaves together an impressive amount of research on Peirce's early life, connecting thoughts to the thinker. However, the device of fictional scholarship becomes very complicated, awkward and, ultimately, impossible to sustain. If, as pragmatism claims, truth is whatever works, then this book cannot be called true. (Aug.) FYI: Indiana University is releasing Joseph Brent's Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life in a revised and enlarged edition. ($35 ISBN 0-253-33350-4; paper $18.95 -21161-1)