Abstract

Peirce thought of himself as an “objective idealist;” and in 1892 he called his philosophy a “Schelling-fashioned idealism.” But this claim of his is one of several fundamental assertions that he made about his work which has not been well or widely understood. The prevailing attitude of the Pragmatists as a school, toward speculative idealism, was set by Dewey, for whom pragmatism was an escape route. So, although Peirce’s position in the great medieval battle about the reality of universals has been studied and appreciated, the work done on his relation to German idealism still tends to place him in the critical tradition of Kant and his own father, rather than in the speculative tradition of Schelling’s Identity Theory and of Hegel’s Logic.