PEIRCE TO STRAWSON a full-time job During the latter part of his life he lived in poverty in Pennsylvania with his devoted second wife, Juliette Peirce was a highly original thinker Like many another nineteenthcentury philosopher, he took as his starting point the philosophy of Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason he claimed to know almost by heart But he regarded Kant’s comprehension of formal logic as amateurish When he set himself to repair this deficiency he found it necessary to recast substantial parts of the Kantian system, such as the theory of categories Unusually among his contemporaries, he knew and admired the writings of the medieval scholastics, in particular the works of Duns Scotus The feature he most praised in scholastic philosophers (as in Gothic architects) was the complete absence in their work of self-conceit He himself had a high opinion of his own merits, regarding Aristotle and Leibniz as his only peers in logic His work ranged widely, not only over logic in the narrow sense, but also encompassing theory of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind He was the originator of one of the most influential of American schools of philosophy, namely pragmatism During his lifetime, Peirce’s philosophy was presented to the public only in a series of journal articles In 1868 he published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy two articles with the title ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’: these set out an early version of his epistemology The results are mainly negative: we have no power of introspection, and we have no power of thinking without signs Above all we have no power of intuition: every cognition is determined logically by some prior cognition More influential was a series of ‘illustrations of the logic of science’ which appeared in the Popular Science Monthly in 1877–8 In these he enunciated his principle of fallibilism, that anything that claims to be human knowledge may, in the end, turn out to be mistaken This, he insisted, does not mean that there is no such thing as objective truth Absolute truth is the goal of scientific inquiry, but the most we can achieve is ever-improving approximations to it One of the 1878 articles contains the first formulation of what was later called ‘the principle of pragmatism’ This was to the effect that in order to attain clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve (EWP 300) In 1884 Peirce edited a collection of Johns Hopkins Studies in Logic He wrote an essay on the logic of relations, and his system of quantificational logic 35