Brent's narrative leans heavily on such direct quotations from unpublished manuscripts and epistolary material, so that one can appreciate that Brent's work was seriously retarded by the refusal of the Harvard Philosophy Department circa 1958 to grant him access to four boxes of Peirce family letters. When he gained knowledge of some of the contents from other archival sources -- and quoted from them in a 1960 doctoral dissertation in history at UCLA -- he incurred, as he reports it, the wrath of Harvard. He believes that this hostility more than any professional judgment on the quality of his work accounted for the failure of academic presses to publish his dissertation in the 1960s.

      Happily, Brent's preface reports that in 1989 Indiana University Press paid him a small advance to bring up to date and reconsider the doctoral work of thirty years before. Without incident, Harvard gave permission to quote from its full collection, and the shroud of secrecy surrounding Peirce's personal life, maintained by surviving relatives as well as a decorous Harvard department, was officially broken.

      The family archive does in fact contain dirt on Peirce, but the real scandal is more institutional than personal. It lies in the conduct of scientific rivals, who seized upon Peirce's weaknesses to deny him preferment, employment, and grants. Brent documents what others have also observed: that after the death of Peirce's main patron, his father Benjamin Peirce, Jr., a group closed in upon him; the movement was orchestrated at crucial junctures by Simon Newcomb, the noted astronomer who succeeded Peirce's father as the most influential American scientist of his generation. Such eminences as the university presidents Eliot of Harvard, Gilman of Johns Hopkins, and Butler of Columbia were among Charles Peirce's leading detractors. Though they sometimes claimed to be protecting innocent students from Peirce's allegedly baneful moral influence, they also took care to deny him opportunities for guest lectures and pure research that involved no student contact.

      Peirce's family and publishing connections, his admitted brilliance, and his own and his wife's inherited income, until they lost it in the crash of 1893, were such that he could not be eliminated entirely from the intellectual scene. His supporters included William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, a few loyal students he had inspired in his four years at Johns Hopkins, some college classmates, and several important editors, officials, publishers, and men of means: Garrison of the Nation, Carus of the Monist, Cattell of Popular Science Monthly, Baldwin of the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Smith of the Century Dictionary, Langley of the Smithsonian, the publishers Putnam and Plimpton, the millionaires Pinchot and Morrison.

     These admirers often came through in a pinch with a writing commission, a few lectures, a loan, or a direct subsidy. Charles's elder brother James Mills Peirce, a Harvard mathematics professor and dean of the graduate school, intervened to straighten out his financial affairs, and his younger brother Herbert, a career diplomat, used his Washington connections as well as those of Senator (and cousin) Henry Cabot Lodge on Charles's behalf.

     But in the small university world of his day, [605] Peirce's enemies controlled the heights. When Peirce was forty-five, Daniel C. Gilman abruptly dismissed him from Johns Hopkins upon receiving testimony that Peirce had lived with his second wife before the completion of the legal divorce from his first. After that Peirce was repeatedly blackballed from further university positions. When, in his mid-fifties, he began to reach, as philosophers often do, the full range of his powers, there was no institution to underwrite him, no body of students to take direct guidance from him.

      Peirce's most enraging flaw was that he often seemed not to care. He was dedicated to making his mind a vessel through which reality might shine, and this gave him a childlike insouciance that was both a provocation and an easy target for academics bent on the more mundane aspects of their calling.

      Charles had been raised in a hothouse environment in which intellectual excellence was prized above all else. His father, aunt, uncles, and family friends led lives largely devoted to science and mathematics. The elder Peirce was so completely concentrated upon intellectual achievement that, in the midst of the Civil War, he condoned slavery if used, as in ancient Greece, to free an elite for scientific inquiry. He began training his son early in mathematical games and in discrimination among the senses. When Charles was eleven he wrote "A History of Chemistry." At sixteen, father and son began regular readings in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; at eighteen Charles worked with his father's sister on an English translation of the section on the Transcendental Analytic.

     Both at Harvard and nationally, the Peirce circle was at the center of a movement dedicated to the proposition that intellectual excellence alone should determine appointments to scientific and scholarly positions. This meritocratic view, always of limited appeal, reflected a devotion to inquiry that became the guiding principle of Charles Peirce's life. It explains both the singleness of purpose and the resilience that enabled him to surmount many tribulations.

     In charting Peirce's troubles, Brent does not flinch from the lugubrious or the sensational. He documents the facial neuralgia that caused Peirce excruciating physical pain for most of his life, the resulting addiction to narcotics, the violent outbursts, the periods of near madness, the (hetero-) sexual excesses, the financial crises, the petty mendacities and thefts. On slimmer evidence, Brent speculates on Peirce as a wife beater and on the earlier career of Peirce's second wife, Juliette, as a French courtesan. And, on Peirce's authority, he presents the philosopher's left-handedness as a disability comparable to neuralgia (Peirce attributed the incomprehensibility of his work to his "left-brained," diagrammatic way of thinking).

     Brent is at his archival best, however, in tracing the bureaucratic proceedings that resulted in Peirce being severed from Johns Hopkins, ousted from the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and finally, denied an early Carnegie grant despite the support of the president of the United States, the secretary of war, a raft of the leading philosophers and editors, and Andrew Carnegie himself. At almost every turn Brent shows how Peirce's self-absorption and consequent obtuseness to his effect on others conspired to undercut his own cause.

     As a consolation, Peirce, at age sixty-four, received the honor from the Harvard Corporation of allowing private funds raised by William James to be passed through it to pay him for a series of lectures -- his one fleeting academic berth in all the years after the Johns Hopkins dismissal. The talks were given in Sever Hall, which stands on the site of the house where Peirce grew up (a bronze plaque noting this fact now graces the entry of the building).

     Ever proving himself beholden to no one, Peirce opened the lectures with what must have appeared as chaffingly condescending remarks about the lively but mistaken pragmatism of William James, his most reliable friend and benefactor, who had generously credited Peirce with originating the philosophical doctrine. Peirce saw Jamesian pragmatism as exaggerating practicality into a metaphysical doctrine parading as an anti-metaphysics. (James, as Peirce saw it, took practical effect as a criterion of truth rather than as a razor for clarifying meaning, and Peirce would soon rename his own view "pragmaticism," the better to distinguish it from that of James.)

     James reacted by firing off an uncharacteristically furious letter, not quoted by Brent, calling Peirce "a monster of desultory intellect . . . without even any intellectual residuum from his work that can be called a finished construction, only 'suggestions' and a begging old [606] age." James subsequently discouraged publication of the Sever Hall lectures, but continued to stand by Peirce financially, raising a fund that assisted him in the mendicant, unusually productive final decade of his life.

     In assessing Peirce as a philosopher, Brent has profited from the thirty years since his dissertation. Not only has the accumulating opinion on Peirce's philosophy helped to enrich the accepted view of it, but Brent modifies his earlier, callow thesis of a direct relation between Peirce's temperament and the allegedly failed architectonic of the Peircean system. Instead, he gives us, in his final chapter, a moving gloss on Peirce's own description of himself as a 'wasp in a bottle," buzzing furiously in a glass cage formed by his own self-conception and the reaction of others to it.

     Brent portrays Peirce as spurred by the ruins of his private life and scholarly career to a contrite, peculiarly scientific piety, in which the theoretical gift of hypothesis becomes man's best stab at entering into the mind of God. Brent argues also that the philosopher's belated attempt at a "moral reconstruction of pragmatism" should be read as a "direct result of Peirce's recognition of his own folly and the remorse consequent upon it."

     A single-volume biography has understandable difficulty doing justice to Peirce's philosophical development. For this, one turns to the Peircean corpus itself and to the expanding literature of re-engagement with it. Notwithstanding Peirce's fame as a neglected genius, his work has always commanded the attention of serious thinkers. It can be argued that recognition of his importance has been retarded because major writers have been moved by his work to pursue, not a full and fair understanding of Peirce, but ambitious and sometimes original lines of their own.

     Peirce's papers, certainly, have not wanted for distinguished editors. At his death in 1914, the manuscript materials not previously published were enough to fill seventy-five 500-page volumes of the sort now produced by Indiana University Press. Harvard paid his widow $250 for the lot. Josiah Royce took charge of the editing in the two years before his own death in 1916. In the early 1920s, the editorial task passed to Charles Irving Lewis, who had been brought to Harvard partly for this purpose after his Survey of Symbolic Logic (1918) proclaimed Peirce's contribution, on the basis of the published materials alone, to have been "the most considerable of any up to his time, with the doubtful exception of Boole."

     Lewis spent two years immersed in the manuscripts and wrote an editorial plan before giving the project up to pursue his own work in modal logic. In the 1920s the fundraising efforts of a student of James and Royce, Morris Raphael Cohen of the City College of New York, enabled Harvard to employ as editors two junior faculty members Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, who were themselves to become important professors of philosophy.

     Their first volume, published in 1931, cast Peirce's work into a mold for philosophy propounded by Alfred North Whitehead in his Gifford Lectures of 1926-27 (published as Process and Reality in 1929), in which a philosophical system was seen as generated recursively by a few fundamental metaphysical categories. Peirce seemed to fit this model precisely. From his triadic divisions of signs to his metaphysical categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, triadicity recurred throughout his writings. To lay bare the architectonic of his philosophy, the editors began their collection with a volume devoted to Peirce's writings on the categories, without regard to chronology, to suggest that all else was generated from them. By 1935 Harvard University Press had issued the first six volumes of an eventual eight-volume Collected Papers, organized thematically.

     The Hartshorne-Weiss edition revolutionized the accepted view of Peirce. Previous to it even Peirce's staunchest admirers considered his work fragmentary and undeveloped. The "tragedy" of Peirce was thought to be that his erratic temperament and unfavorable circumstances had conspired to deprive the world of any connected piece of his reasoning. Even Cohen, who had compiled the first Peirce bibliography (1916) and had edited a well-selected anthology of a dozen of Peirce's published essays (1923), had placed him among the lonely pioneers of philosophy whose main influence was in the fruitful suggestions they gave to others.

      The Harvard Collected Papers, by contrast, established Peirce as the author of a major philosophical system. But it also set him up for a fall. It seemed to have him claiming too much. [608] A wave of contrarian scholarship arose showing the Peircean "system" to be quaint, or failed, or no single system at all but two incipient systems in conflict with each other, or a series of three or four of them each developing out of the collapse of the previous one. The author of the most thorough and influential of these critical works merely reflected academic common sense circa 1965 when he wrote, in the first issue of the quarterly Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, that "so much of Peirce's writing is so bizarre that the reader clings for dear life to those few doctrines which, like pragmatism, have an aura of reasonableness about them."

     It was not until 1958, with the publication of the seventh and eighth volumes of the Collected Papers, edited by Arthur W. Burks and underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, that the scholarly apparatus to the Harvard edition included a partial chronology enabling readers to date the various excerpts. And it was not until 1967 that Richard S. Robin's annotated catalogue of the Harvard manuscript materials was published. (The editorial introduction to the recent electronic edition of the Collected Papers recommends using its search features in conjunction with the Burks and Robin bibliographies to undo the "artificial dismemberment of the Peircean corpus" in the topical arrangement of the original editors.)

     In 1973 increasing dissatisfaction with the captious cast of the secondary literature led a group of scholars from the Charles S. Peirce Society to call for a more comprehensive, critical edition of his work, chronologically arranged. Under Edward C. Moore, the founding director of the Peirce Edition Project, funds were raised from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and (in a remarkable gesture for an out-of-state writer by a local elected body) the Indiana State Legislature. Work on the chronological edition began in 1975 on the Indianapolis campus of Indiana and Purdue universities. It took a team of scholars six years to decipher, date, collate, transcribe, select, verify, emend, and annotate manuscripts before the first critically edited volume was ready for press. After eighteen years, the fifth volume, just out, takes Peirce's writings only through the aftermath of the Johns Hopkins period.

     To hasten the dissemination of the post-Hopkins materials -- a selection of which is now projected at twenty-five further volumes -- photocopies of the full collection of dated manuscripts were early made available in open file cabinets both at the Peirce Edition Project and at the Center for the Study of Pragmaticism at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Both the Indiana and Texas centers have other research aids that attract international visitors. The directors of both have actively promoted a range of research and study materials (most recently, The Essential Peirce, two volumes edited for convenient classroom and scholarly use by the current and past directors of the Peirce Edition Project, Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel). As a result, the chronological edition has already given rise to a new wave of scholarship on Peirce's development.

     The doyen of this scholarly movement is Max H. Fisch, whose first contribution to the Peirce literature came in 1939. Named by the Harvard Philosophy Department in 1959 as the official biographer, Fisch set about methodically to collect all relevant archival materials. Beginning with Brent's contribution of his extensive dissertation notes, scholars added to the "Fisch Notes" -- a twenty-thousand-card collation of Peirce materials from numerous family and governmental archives -- which were made more widely available at the Indianapolis and Lubbock centers. In addition, Fisch assembled forty-nine file drawers of scholarly correspondence and offprints on Peirce and an extensive personal library, which now forms the basis of more than seven hundred linear feet of bookshelves lining the walls of the Peirce Edition Project. As Fisch proceeded, he issued strategically placed articles that illuminated aspects of Peirce's thought and milieu. His services to other scholars, however, impeded his own progress on a biography. A punctilious correspondent, he was also known (as this writer can testify) to open his office, his files, and his home for weeks at a time to visiting researchers.

     When Fisch's advancing years (he is now ninety-four) put a biography beyond his grasp, the directors of the Indiana and Texas centers, Christian Kloesel and Kenneth Laine Ketner, performed the filial act of collecting most of his important writings on Peirce under the title Peirce, Semeiotic and Pragmatism.

     A careful scholar, Fisch nevertheless had a [609] bold thesis on the origins of Peirce's pragmatism. Though Peirce was almost wholly preoccupied with science and logic, Fisch early suggested that the origins and implications of Peirce's philosophy were social. In this he followed an insight from Vico, who in Fisch's translation of him presents even logical relations as reflections upon institutionally dominant habits of thought. In an essay not reprinted in the collection, Fisch sees philosophy itself as emerging from the "critique of institutions."

     For Peirce's pragmatism the institutional and social origins are, Fisch argued, bound up with law. Peirce and James both traced the doctrine to the early 1870s in the meetings of the Cambridge Metaphysical Club. Of the six most active club members, three were lawyers. Whereas James credited Peirce with pragmatism, Peirce himself cited Nicholas St. John Green, among the founding group of professors of the Harvard Law School, as the "grandfather of pragmatism."

     Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in his time the leading American writer on jurisprudence, was another of the active lawyers in the Cambridge Metaphysical Club, and Fisch saw in Holmes's youthful "prediction theory of law" the first application of pragmatism to the social sphere. Holmes's prediction theory defined law as what the legal system could be expected to enforce after whim and idiosyncrasy were winnowed out by successive review. This fit the pragmatic maxim as Peirce would later expound it, first in French and then in carefully convoluted English phrasing: "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."

     Notwithstanding Holmes's antipathy to Peirce's speculative tendencies, Fisch suggested in the 1942 article that opens his collected essays that a Peircean recasting of Holmes might supply a more systematic logical ground than Holmes himself could muster.

     Fifty years later, in the midst of a self-described pragmatic movement in American law schools, few have taken up Fisch's suggestion. Among the lawyers, an attempt to fashion a Wittgensteinian pragmatism (for which Richard Rorty rather than Wittgenstein would appear to be the philosophical mentor) may have delayed a grasp of Peirce's thought. The adage attributed to Wittgenstein that "meaning is use" is often misread as a pithy substitute for Peirce's original pragmatic maxim.

      The original of Wittgenstein's remark, however, is neither pithy nor pragmatic. The words "meaning . . . is . . . use" are extracted from a much longer sentence that Wittgenstein characteristically limits to "a large class of cases -- though not for all -- in which we use the word 'meaning.'" The abridgment encourages a merely empirical inquiry into the practices of identifiable communities of interpreters. Peirce's pragmatic maxim, by contrast, is cast in a bolder spirit. It identifies meaning with conceivable practical bearings, independent of actual usage. It thus extends the community of interpreters hypothetically and indefinitely into all conceivable futures.

     Peirce's maxim is intended to make a place for the imaginative element in science -- hypothesis, the hallmark of what he called the method of abduction. Transposed into legal thought it would emphasize the vision that distinguishes disciplined jurisprudential reasoning from that of the pedestrian practitioner.

      On a factual standard of use, Holmes's prediction theory of law could be maintained without much discernment. It would merely assert -- as in fact Holmes did assert -- the doctrine that law is what those in authority can reasonably be expected to do when on good behavior. It would seek the ultimate locus of law in current professional canons, a quest with understandable appeal in the law schools. By contrast, if pragmatic meaning extends to conceivability, the circle of interpretation will be more open. A prediction theory of law must then take into account a range of conjectured futures, many of which may not accord with the profession's conventional norms. The theory might then lead -- as Holmes was indeed led -- to a supplementary doctrine of judicial restraint founded in the fallibility of the legal profession.

     A Peircean pragmatism thus shifts emphasis from the actual to the potential; by adding a greater burden of foresight, it anticipates Holmes's more mature jurisprudence. Which is what Fisch meant to suggest: that a Peircean standpoint helps to make explicit the underlying coherence in Holmes's thought in a way that eluded Holmes himself and that provides a logical basis for a reconstructed legal pragmatism.

     To which Peirce responded: "Is not the direct contrary nearer the observed facts?" That is, is not consciousness better defined by what it shares than what it negates in its relation with others? Is not thought itself, even the most private, really a dialogue involving signs that have meaning only by virtue of their effects in a world of outward relations? And if this is so, is not our capacity to enter into more general relations through our use of signs the very definition of human personality? On Peirce's view, a being speaking a purely private language would have a self utterly devoid of humanity.

     In his early writings, when he adopted somewhat polemical stances to make his philosophy accessible to a broader readership, Peirce was wont to cast his communal insights in opposition to the logical individualism underlying English nominalism; at later times he railed against the crass individualism of the Gilded Age. In such moods he sometimes denied the self altogether. Colapietro's service is to glean the best from Peirce's writings on the self, supplemented by his mature concepts of indi[617]viduality, continuity, organism, substance, and mind, and to suggest that a fully elaborated Peircean account would subsume a doctrine of individual personality in a larger perspective. Colapietro also joins Peirce himself, Walker Percy, and others in believing that a philosophical psychology along Peircean lines would avoid confusions in psychology and brain science deriving from overly rigid subject-object and mind-body dichotomies.

      Colapietro's reconstruction, however, stops short of the technical virtuosity that makes Peirce compelling in other fields. Colapietro is aware that Peirce's system provides the raw material for a still more precise treatment: The modalities of the interpretant include terms to describe the formation and reshaping of habits. Unfortunately, Peirce waited until too late in life to undertake the demanding task of refashioning his terms to account for "self-control" at the level of the sign-interpretant. To supply this gap would complete his project.

     For it is integral to Peirce's view that the more general our grasp of reality becomes,the more precise and ramified will be our explanations. Far from submerging all distinctions in the Oneness of the All, his concept of continuity would have us proceed from a core of received, often fruitfully vague ideas to an ever more differentiated picture. Each new discovery leads to others. Each new concept is open to further elaboration. It is through the purposeful embrace of the public and communal character of semiosis that the self finds its ultimate meaning.

     Does this vision, congenial to science, extend beyond the laboratory? Do the compact conceptions of Peirce's philosophy have the broader applicability he intended?

     For the crucial core of Peirce's later philosophy -- the theorizing that proceeds from the continuous sign relationship -- the range of his relevance cannot be in doubt. Once we accept Wittgenstein's verdict that "all thinking is essentially operating with signs," it follows that theorizing about the power, presuppositions, and limits of semiosis has by definition a universal subject matter. It must apply to anything and everything that may occur to consciousness. Thus, had our discussion centered on the current scholarship that treats Peirce's significance for the arts, morals, religion, linguistics, anthropology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, cinematography, information theory, or quantum physics, the same organizing concepts -- semiosis, continuity, pragmatic meaning, modalities of signs, reality -- would have come into play.

      As a result, three tendencies in twentieth-century philosophy that have also claimed broad applicability require Peirce's perspective for their own completion. The linguistic turn that has dominated the English-speaking world is a subspecies of the semiotic approach that Peirce took. The phenomenological movement popular on the Continent is likewise insufficiently self-critical without a phenomenology of signs, the medium in which thought itself takes place (and Husserl's late metaphysical attempt in this direction in fact took a triadic, albeit ego-centered, form). The scientific trend in philosophy, insofar as it excludes the interpreting mind from its working definition of reality, is subsumed and re-oriented in Peirce, who locates its abstractions in a more capacious yet no less exacting context. (Abner Shimony, the noted practitioner and philosopher of quantum physics, concludes the section on complex systems of his two-volume Search for a Naturalistic Worldview with this self-effacing credo: "It is honorable to be an epigone of Peirce.")

      Admittedly, it seems extravagant to suggest that a blackballed, debt-ridden, small-brained, left-handed, pain-wracked, opium-eating, skirt-chasing, nineteenth-century recluse, by the simple device of including the sign-interpretant in the formal definition of the sign and by a life-long struggle to draw out the implications of this idea, may still have more to teach us than the contemporary discussions we have learned to regard as momentous.

      But consider: From his first paper on the subject in 1867, Peirce returned repeatedly to the continuous sign relationship. For the last three decades of his life, Peirce worked in increasing isolation, writing prodigiously, publishing only a portion -- buzzing furiously, as he put it, like a wasp in a bottle. His interests and his situation reinforced each other. He attended more and more to phenomena of common experience that could be examined without the benefit of colleagues or scientific instruments. Though the growth of the modern university has done great things for topics that can be cast into specialized departments, there is no reason to suppose that anyone in [618] the past century would have duplicated, let alone superseded, Peirce's concentration on a few ineluctable and inter-related concepts. The only excuse for not taking him seriously is a skeptical dogmatism that would have us deny (on a priori grounds?) that some ideas may be more fundamental than others.

     Peirce's chosen idioms were doubly demanding: on the one hand, metaphysics, in which contributions are judged against a tradition of 2,400 years; on the other, symbolic logic, then in its infancy, of which he was a pioneer in its algebraic, quantificational, and topological forms. He insisted that each must reflect the other. How many writers of the past century have had Peirce's aptitude for both prongs of this bilingual enterprise, or have matched his unrelenting fecundity in concurrent innovation in them into his seventies?

      Now, eighty years after his death, Peirce has himself become a topic for specialized inquiry. New tools for scholarship and for pedagogy are giving him a delayed afterlife. The consensus ad quem is that we shall have to take him more fully into account. The wasp is out of the bottle. His sting remains to be felt.

Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volume 5, 1884-1886. Compiled by the Editors of the Peirce Edition Project. Indiana University Press, 1993. $75.

Historical Perspectives on Peirce's Logic of Science: A History of Science. Edited by Carolyn Eisele. Mouton Publishers, 1985. 2 volumes, $306.70.

Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation, Part Four: Index. Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner. Texas Tech University Press, 1987. $44.

The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1, 1867-1893. Edited by Nathan Houser and Christian J. W. Kloesel. Indiana University Press, 1992. $45; paper, $19.95. Volume 2, forthcoming, 1995.

Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898 of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner, with an introduction by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Hilary Putnam. Harvard University Press, 1992. $45; paper, $22.50.

Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic. By Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by James Hoopes. University of North Carolina Press 1991. $39.95; paper, $13.95.

The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. MS-DOS version, with an editorial introduction by John Deely. InteLex Corporation, 1994. 8 vols. on 7 MB. $134.95 for individuals $324.95 for institutions.

Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Nathan Houser, Don D. Roberts, and James Van Evra. Indiana University Press, forthcoming, 1995.

Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries. Edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner. Fordham University Press, forthcoming, 1994. $35.

Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science. Edited by Edward C. Moore. University of Alabama Press, 1993. $49.95.

Peirce and Value Theory: On Peircean Ethics and Aesthetics. Edited by Herman Parret. Benjamins, North America, 1993. $95.

Peirce and Law: Issues in Pragmatism, Legal Realism, and Semiotics. Edited by Roberta Kevelson. Peter Lang, 1991. $43.95.

Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. By Joseph Brent, with an introduction by Thomas Sebeok. Indiana University Press, 1993. $35.

Peirce, Semeiotic and Pragmatism: Essays By Max H. Fisch, edited by Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel. Indiana University Press, 1986. $45.

Peirce. By Christopher Hookway. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Paper (1992), $17.95.

A Peircean Reduction Thesis: The Foundations of Topological Logic. By Robert W. Burch. Texas Tech University Press, 1991. $30.

Peirce's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity. By Vincent M. Colapietro. State University of New York Press, 1989. $59.50; paper, $19.95.

Science, Knowledge, and Mind: A Study in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. By C. F. Delaney. University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. $28.95.

Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy. By Carl R. Hausman. Cambridge University Press, 1993. $49.95.

Charles S. Peirce: Logic and the Classification of the Sciences. By Beverly Kent. McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987. $44.95.

Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. By C. J. Misak. Oxford University Press, 1991. $55.

* JOSIAH LEE AUSPITZ is the secretary of the Sabre Foundation. His article on Michael Oakeshott appeared in the Summer 1991 issue of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR