2 Peirce to Strawson C S Peirce and Pragmatism he thinkers whom we have considered so far in these volumes have all come from Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East The American continent, nowadays home to many of the world’s most influential philosophers, was almost barren of philosophy until the latter part of the nineteenth century In the eighteenth century acute contributions to different areas of philosophy were made by the Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) and the Enlightenment polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) Early in the nineteenth century the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) presented a form of idealism, called ‘transcendentalism’, which was briefly fashionable in the United States But it was with the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) that American philosophy really came of age Peirce was the son of a formidable professor of mathematics at Harvard, and he took a summa cum laude degree in chemistry there in 1863 For thirty years he served on the US coastal survey, and he also undertook research at Harvard Observatory The only book he published, Photometric Researches, was a work of astronomy Around 1872 he joined William James, Chauncey Wright, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others in a discussion group known as the Metaphysical Club He gave several lecture courses at Harvard on the history and logic of science, and from 1879 until 1884 he was a lecturer on logic at the new, research-oriented Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore But he was a difficult colleague, impatient of academic conventions, and his marriage to Melusina Fay, a pioneering feminist, broke down in 1883 He failed to obtain tenure, and he never again held an academic post or T