Description

Peirce came late to the view that there is 'enough truth' in ethics to make it an appropriate target of philosophical investigation. The quotation above comes from the 1903 Harvard lectures, given in Boston in the spring of that year. This was Peirce's second set of public lectures in five years, following his 1898 Cambridge Lectures, delivered in Lowell. Both sets had been secured and supported financially by the efforts of William James. It is a great irony that much of the work Peirce undertook in the Harvard lectures that James arranged was the work of disambiguating his own pragmatism, or pragmaticism, from the variant popularized by James. Insofar as the lectures serve this function, they are a critical text in the history of American pragmatism.