ABSTRACT
Charles Sanders Peirce was the first pragmatist. He was the first to describe it as a scientific method and articulate it in a comprehensive philosophy. Peirce was influenced by many sources, constructing an epistemology that was realist, fallibilistic, holistic and practical. This book recovers a principal undervalued source, one Peirce grudgingly recognised, Transcendentalism. This Emersonian interpretation of Romanticism expressed itself in key concepts in Peirce’s pragmatism and underwrote his view of epistemology and scientific progress.
