The American Aristotle | Hacker News Reader

The American Aristotle

aeon.co

26 pointsbenbreen6 comments

While Peirce, when he is known at all, is usually known as one of the early philosophical pragmatists, I believe by far his greatest contributions are to formal reasoning. His discovery of the universal and existential qualifiers (for which we use his notation), as well as taking de Morgan’s study of relations to what is essentially its modern form both stand out.

His semiotic is not the postmodernist bullshit (in the sense of Harry Frankfurt) that is usually denoted by the term. It was a pragmatic attempt to understand why symbolic reasoning works and the specific mechanics by which symbols signify their referent mediated by an interpretant. His obsession with clarity is the exact opposite of postmodernist “semiotics.”

He also was a pioneer in Boolean logic and was the first to demonstrate that NOR is functionally complete. This later had real applications -- the Apollo Guidance Computer was made up of 5,600 NOR gates, for instance [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOR_logic

Peirce is, sadly, much underrated. His work on abductive logic/explanation is another rich area for exploration. I actually think it's somewhat unfortunate that he's labeled merely as an american pragmatist. While true, such a classification misses the many ways his work outstrips that school of thought (and outstrips that tradition so much more than Dewey's or James' work, say, could be said to outstrip american pragmatism).

And this is largely because his "friend" Simon Newcomb did everything he could to destroy his reputation[1]. It's fascinating and saddening that a little piece of nastiness like that has reverberated through the decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Newcomb#Peirce_family

I have been reading a lot of Peirce lately. His range of knowledge and method of thought is truly breathtaking. He was obsessed with taxonomy, and it is almost poetic how he organizes and reorganizes the bodies of scientific knowledge according to his thought. He was like Adam naming all the animals in the garden of Eden. Truly the most under appreciated philosopher of our time.

The author claims that Peirce "surpassed [all other scientists born in the 19th century] in sheer intellectual virtuosity"; then goes on to laud Peirce's contributions to the towering scientific field of "semiotics."

I'll stick with Einstein, Darwin, and Maxwell, thanks.

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