Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was born in Cambridge, Mass. Educated from a young age mainly by his father, a Harvard mathematician, Peirce graduated from Harvard University at the bottom of his class. He taught logic at the Johns Hopkins University from 1879-1884 and gave a few philosophical lectures at Harvard and the Lowell Institute in Boston, but was unable to secure a permanent teaching position. Subsequently, he went to work for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. He continued, however, to produce an impressive work body of original philosophy and fundamentally influenced the thought of other leading American philosophers of the time, including William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce.

Peirce had begun to develop his ideas at the "metaphysical club" in Cambridge, Mass., an informal discussion group that included William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes. His metaphysics grew out of his close study of Kant, Hegel, and the recent evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). The entire universe according to Peirce is one mind moving toward a rational end but its driving force is love. But just as ... Kierkegaard and Nietzsche developed Hegel's absolute idealism toward an understanding of the world entire not as a thing but as itself consisting in words and symbols, a sort of symbolic text or program, Pierce carries this process to its logical conclusion and becomes the founder of the view that the whole of reality, itself, is to be viewed as consisting in signs.

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)