Abstract

Charles Sanders Peirce shares with many pragmatists, both classical and contemporary, a certain distrust of metaphysics, the nature and importance of which have been constantly questioned at the turn of the 20th century. It is however him who, after having decried it, claimed the possibility and the necessity of metaphysics. It is shown that this pragmaticist metaphysical project, which emphasizes logic, semiotics, inquiry and science (but without scientism), against the background of a very specific realist approach, is a source of inspiration for any enterprise concerned with responding to the “Integration Challenge”, and thus to think the links between metaphysics and epistemology, an objective which the metaphysician is held to tackle, if he wants to be able to establish the conditions of possibility of a genuine metaphysical knowledge.