All rationality as a thinker, all unreasonableness as a man: this ancient non sequitur was never more vividly realised than in C.S. Peirce, first and foremost of the American Pragmatists. Peirce was a major philosopher and prodigiously many things besides, polymathic to a degree that should have been impossible in the later 19th century: 'Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist; lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician and metaphysician.' The list was made by his most supportive modern editor, but even if Peirce wasn't equally competent in all these roles that shouldn't disallow the same editor's claim that he was 'the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced'.

LRB 10 February 1994 | PDF Download