Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Brief Lives

C.S. Peirce (1839-1914)

Was he the greatest American philosopher? Alistair MacFarlane studies the signs.

Look around you. What do you see? Not merely shapes and colours, but things with meanings: tables, chairs, cars, people, animals… You see what Peirce called ‘signs’. Peirce saw reality in terms of what things mean to us, and his world was a world of signs. He regarded even himself as a sign. His theory of semiotics – the study of signs, their function and their interpretation – was only one of his many highly original contributions to philosophy.

…