Categories (Peirce) (original) (raw)

On May 14, 1867, the 27–year-old Charles Sanders Peirce, who eventually founded pragmatism, presented a paper entitled "On a New List of Categories" to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among other things, this paper outlined a theory of predication involving three universal categories that Peirce continued to apply in philosophy and elsewhere for the rest of his life. The categories demonstrate and concentrate the pattern seen in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878, the foundational paper for pragmatism), and other three-way distinctions in Peirce's work.