Pierce and James

[calbert at hslboxmaster.com]

Wood Jim sez:

> I have no idea what Peirce, the American pragmatist,
>  has to with  Peirce Inverarity. 

I don't know that the "characters" are directly "wed" and
I may be p*ssing in the breeze, but:

"Charles was the son of Benjamin Peirce, (Chauncey) Wright's old 
mentor at Harvard and boss at the Almanac. They met in 1857, 
when Charles was eighteen and Wright twenty-seven, and soon 
began getting together almost daily to debate the nature of the 
universe. (This is where it gets interesting, I promise).Their main 
point of contentionwas determinism. FOr unlike Wirght, who 
thought that every event had a physical cause, Peirce believed in 
the existence of absolute chance - THE UNCAUSED CAUSE. This 
belief, which he eventually called "tychism", became the basis for 
his cosmology."

The Socrates of Cambridge, Louis Menand........NYRB, 4/26/01

love,
cfa