Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839-1914), American philosopher,
physicist and mathematician and the founder of pragmatism, was born
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was the
leading American Mathematician of the time and Perkins professor of
mathematics and astronomy at Harvard.
… He worked, more or less privately, at philosophy and logic,
steadily publishing works on these subjects from 1866 on.
From Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards ed,
Vol 6 Macmillan 1967
...For despite his brilliance, and originality—indeed, perhaps
because of his brilliance and originality, and his refusal to
“popularize” his writings—he was unable to obtain a regular
teaching post in any American university. His last years were spent
in poverty and ill health. During his whole life he wrote
voluminously, but much of what he wrote remained unpublished until
long after his death. (P 262)
... Peirce believed that love--love in exactly the sense in which the New Testiment asserts that "God is love"-- is the animating force in the evolution of the cosmos. (P 297)
From History of Western Philosophy Vol IV, W. T.
Jones,
Harcourt Brace Jonanovich College Publishers, 2nd
Ed, 1975
...Peirce introduced the term “Pragmatism” in
1878 as the name of a theory of meaning whose criterion was the
Pragmatic maxim. Among his statements of the maxim we cite the
following: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual
concept one should consider what practical consequences might
conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception;
and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning
of the conception.” Years later in his final treatment of the maxim
he held that it allows for “would-be’s,” e.g. that a diamond
buried in the sea, or forever swathed in cotton, and never put to the
test of hardness, is nonetheless to be regarded as hard. In 1905,
troubled that the popularizers of pragmatism—including William
James—had turned it from a theory of meaning to a theory of action,
he renamed his own doctrine “Pragmaticism,” a name “ugly
enough” to be safe from kidnappers.
From Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, W. L.
Reese,
Humanities Press 1980, p 419
The above quotes summarize the ideas presented by Peirce sufficiently for my needs, and can hardly be stated more clearly or succinctly.
Here is a Dictionary of terms he utilized to communicate his meaning.