PEIRCE TO STRAWSON was presented by one of his students The system included a novel notation for representing the syntax of relations: e.g the compound sign ‘Lij’ could represent that Isaac loves Jessica, and the sign ‘Gijk’ could represent that Isaac gave Jessica to Kore It also contained two signs for quantifiers, ‘Ó’ corresponding to ‘some’, and ‘—’ corresponding to ‘all’ The syntax of Peirce’s ‘General Algebra of Logic’, as he called it, was equivalent to that of the system of logic that Gottlob Frege, unknown to him, had developed in Germany a few years previously In The Monist in 1891–2, ‘A Guess at the Riddle’, Peirce presented his metaphysics and philosophy of mind against the background of an overall evolutionary cosmology The definitive statement of his pragmatism (which he now preferred to call ‘pragmaticism’, since he wished to disown some of the theses of his pragmatist disciples) was issued in a course of lectures at Harvard in 1903 and a further series of papers in The Monist in 1905 In the last years of his life Peirce worked hard to develop a general theory of signs—a ‘semiotic’ as he called it—as a framework for the philosophy of thought and language Many of these ideas, which some regard as his most important contribution to philosophy, were worked out between 1903 and 1912 in correspondence with an Englishwoman, Victoria Welby Peirce never completed the full synthesis of philosophy on which he worked for many years, and at his death left a mass of unpublished drafts, many of which were posthumously published once interest in his work blossomed in the twentieth century His influence on other philosophers has not been in proportion to his genius Peirce’s work in logic was never presented in a fully rigorous form, and it was Frege who, through Russell, gave to the world the logical system that the two of them had independently conceived Peirce’s subtle version of pragmatism never seized the imagination of the world in the same way as the more popular version of his admirer William James It is to the work of Frege and James, therefore, that we now turn The Logicism of Frege Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) was known to few people in his lifetime, but after his death came to occupy a unique position in the history of philosophy He was the inventor of modern mathematical logic, and an outstanding 37