Peirce's Categories

Graham R. Shutt (gshutt@u.washington.edu)
Tue, 17 Jun 1997 12:18:41 -0700 (PDT)

Peirce made many attempts at describing his categories of Firstness,
Secondness, and Thirdness. It might, perhaps, be instructive to look at
"On a New List of Categories" (1867), Peirce's first fully elaborated
discussion of his categories. In a 1905 letter to the Italian philosopher
Mario Calderoni, Peirce described his paper as "my one contribution to
philosophy" (CP 8.213) and, along with "Some Consequences of Four
Incapacities" (1868), considered it one of his two "strongest
philosophical works."

"On a New List of Categories" is a compressed and difficult paper, but it
has been my experience that the descriptions Peirce made of his categories
late in life, such as in the 1903 lectures that John Sowa mentioned, tend
to be somewhat murky unless one has an understanding of the history of the
terms.

"On a New List of Categories" is one of five papers Peirce presented to
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences when he was elected a member in
1867--at the age of 27. The other papers are: "On an Improvement in
Boole's Calculus of Logic," "On the Natural Classification of Arguments,"
"Upon the Logic of Mathematics," and "Upon Logical Comprehension and
Extension."

"On a New List of Categories" may be found in vol. 5 of the _Collected
Papers_, vol. 2 of the _Writings_, and in _The Essential Peirce_ vol. 1.

Graham R. Shutt