Charles S. Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, logician and scientist, the founder of pragmatism and of the modern theory of signs. The son of the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce, he worked for three decades for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, making important measurements of gravity, and taught logic for a few years at Johns Hopkins. His papers "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" launched pragmatism, which William James later made famous. Much of his vast, original work in logic and philosophy remained unpublished when he died in poverty in Milford, Pennsylvania.