Peirce Edition Project

Origins The idea of a comprehensive chronological edition of the Peirce papers began to be conceived at the beginning of the 1960s. Not that such a wish had not been expressed even earlier—C. I. Lewis, for one, mused about it in the 1930s—but four factors precipitated the need for it. The first stemmed from the publication of the Collected Papers in the first half of the 1930s (the first six volumes) and the last half of the 1950s (volumes 7 and 8). The effect of the Collected Papers was to jumpstart the scholarly study of Peirce’s writings and sustain its vigor for more than forty years. That edition saved Peirce from oblivion and attracted vigorous interest, especially after the end of World War II, when the Peirce Society was founded in 1946 under the combined leadership of Frederic H. Young, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and a host of other philosophers. The 1950s saw the emergence of several key scholars: Max H. Fisch, Carolyn Eisele, Arthur Burks, and Murray Murphey. Murphey sp ... Read full article.