When the United States established itself as an independent nation toward the end of the eighteenth century ( 1776) this gave new impetus to the development of a specifically American culture and approach to ideas . But it took hundred years and so far American philosophyto develop to thde point where it commanded international attention; and then there came a time at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th when the best university department of philosophy in the world was considered by many a good judge to be that of Harvard.
Peirce was born at 3 Phillips Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the son of Sarah Hunt Mills and Benjamin Peirce, himself a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University and perhaps the first serious research mathematician in America. At age 12, Charles read his older brother's copy of Richard Whately'sElements of Logic, then the leading English-language text on the subject. So began his lifelong fascination with logic and reasoning. He went on to earn the A.B. and A.M.(1862) from Harvard; in 1863 the Lawrence Scientific School awarded him a B.Sc. that was Harvard's first summa cum laude chemistry degree; and otherwise his academic record was undistinguished. At Harvard, he began lifelong friendships with Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Chauncey Wright, and William James. One of his Harvard instructors, Charles William Eliot, formed an unfavorable opinion of Peirce. This opinion proved fateful, because Eliot, while President of Harvard 1869–1909—a period encompassing nearly all of Peirce's working life—repeatedly vetoed Harvard's employing Peirce in any capacity.
Peirce suffered from his late teens onward from a nervous condition then known as "facial neuralgia", which would today be diagnosed astrigeminal neuralgia. Brent says that when in the throes of its pain "he was, at first, almost stupefied, and then aloof, cold, depressed, extremely suspicious, impatient of the slightest crossing, and subject to violent outbursts of temper". Its consequences may have led to the social isolation which made his life's later years so tragic.
Between 1859 and 1891, Peirce was intermittently employed in various scientific capacities by the United States Coast Survey and its successor, the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, where he enjoyed his highly influential father's protection until the latter's death in 1880. That employment exempted Peirce from having to take part in the Civil War; it would have been very awkward for him to do so, as the Boston Brahmin Peirces sympathized with the Confederacy. At the Survey, he worked mainly in geodesy and gravimetry, refining the use of pendulums to determine small local variations in the Earth's gravity. He was elected a resident fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in January 1867. The Survey sent him to Europe five times, first in 1871 as part of a group sent to observe a solar eclipse; there, he sought out Augustus De Morgan, William Stanley Jevons, and William Kingdon Clifford,British mathematicians and logicians whose turn of mind resembled his own. From 1869 to 1872, he was employed as an Assistant in Harvard's astronomical observatory, doing important work on determining the brightness of stars and the shape of the Milky Way. On April 20, 1877 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Also in 1877, he proposed measuring the meter as so many wavelengths of light of a certain frequency, the kind of definition employed from 1960 to 1983.
During the 1880s, Peirce's indifference to bureaucratic detail waxed while his Survey work's quality and timeliness waned. Peirce took years to write reports that he should have completed in months. Meanwhile, he wrote entries, ultimately thousands during 1883–1909, on philosophy, logic, science, and other subjects for the encyclopedic Century Dictionary. In 1885, an investigation by the Allison Commission exonerated Peirce, but led to the dismissal of Superintendent Julius Hilgard and several other Coast Survey employees for misuse of public funds. In 1891, Peirce resigned from the Coast Survey at Superintendent Thomas Corwin Mendenhall's request. He never again held regular employment.
In 1879, Peirce was appointed Lecturer in logic at the new Johns Hopkins University, which had strong departments in a number of areas that interested him, such as philosophy (Royce and Dewey completed their PhDs at Hopkins), psychology (taught by G. Stanley Hall and studied by Joseph Jastrow, who coauthored a landmark empirical study with Peirce), and mathematics (taught by J. J. Sylvester, who came to admire Peirce's work on mathematics and logic). 1883 saw publication of his Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins University containing works by himself and Allan Marquand, Christine Ladd, Benjamin Ives Gilman, and Oscar Howard Mitchell, several of whom were his graduate students. Peirce's nontenured position at Hopkins was the only academic appointment he ever held.
In 1887 Peirce spent part of his inheritance from his parents to buy 2,000 acres (8 km2) of rural land near Milford, Pennsylvania, which never yielded an economic return. There he had an 1854 farmhouse remodeled to his design. The Peirces named the property "Arisbe". There they lived with few interruptions for the rest of their lives,
Peirce's most important work in pure mathematics was in logical and foundational areas. He also worked on linear algebra, matrices, various geometries, topology and Listing numbers, Bell numbers, graphs, the four-color problem, and the nature of continuity.
He worked on applied mathematics in economics, engineering, and map projections (such as thePeirce quincuncial projection), and was especially active in probability and statistics.
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