The Logical Tracts

Book excerpt: In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full panorama of Charles S. Peirce’s important late writings. Among the most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential graphs to be his greatest contribution to human thought. The manuscripts from 1895—1913, most of which are published here for the first time, testify the richness and open-endedness of his theory of logic and its applications. They also invite us to reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as well as the conventional stories told about the evolution of modern logic. This second volume collects Peirce’s writings on existential graphs related to his Lowell Lectures of 1903, the annus mirabilis of his that became decisive in the development of the mature theory of the graphical method of logic.