From Time & Chance to Consciousness

Charles Peirce (1837-1914) was a physicist, chemist, and mathematician. He has also been described as the finest philosopher the United States has yet produced. He belongs to a long line of physical scientists reaching from Aristotle to Einstein - including contemporaries such as Planck, Schrodinger and Heisenberg - for whom physics was not enough, and who went beyond physics to metaphysics and cosmology.
These are selected papers from the Harvard Congress commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Peirce. The papers are devoted primarily to the metaphysics on which Peirce based the philosophical doctrine of pragmatism - a doctrine that was first proposed by Peirce and later developed by William James and John Dewey.