ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the similarities and differences between the theories of the two pragmatists, namely Charles Peirce and Nicholas Rescher, focusing on their respective notions of ideals. The notion of ideals plays an integral part in the normative thought of both. It was Pierce's discovery late in life of the interrelatedness of esthetics, ethics, logic, and the eventual identification of "the growth of concrete reasonableness" as the ultimate ideal, that, as Peirce puts it, sets us "upon the trail of the secret to pragmatism". For more than forty years, as is well-known among pragmatist scholars, Rescher has championed pragmatism as the basis for his views on a breadth of topics ranging from epistemology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of science, political philosophy, and ethics. Peirce famously declared himself to be a Scotistic scholastic realist "of a somewhat extreme stripe". The chapter looks at Peirce's normative theory.
