Why Hanker After Logic? Mathematical Imagination, Creativity and Perception in Peirce's Systematic Philosophy

Abstract

Charles Sanders Peirce was a restless and passionate man. His greatest passion was philosophy, especially that branch known as logic. A person of immense intellectual power, Peirce devoted much of his thinking life to the analysis of reason itself. He was not content to use reason to dissect narrow sub-problems in philosophy, so he turned to his own mind in order to understand how reason itself functions; and his contributions in this area place him among the great thinkers in the history of philosophy. The origin of new ideas and scientific hypotheses was always of particular interest to him, and he seems to have had a life-long fascination with the question of genius and creativity. The analysis of genius and creativity was not to be left to the psychologists, however. Nor were they to be relegated to the realm of the irrational - Peirce was no romantic. Producing a harmony of creativity and logic was one of Peirce 's underlying philosophic tasks - and in order to do so he had to reformulate logic itself in a radical way. Thus was born Peirce 's logic of relatives - a new logic of interpretation which allowed for the

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