The Discrovery of “Peirce-land”

Because of the difficulty to have access to Peirce's manuscripts, scholars have had to resort too often to second-hand literature. Such a phenomenon produced a huge variety of interpretations and a contrasted image of Peirce's works according to the selection of texts, the intellectual context and the aims of their interprets. Peirce was not that much neglected during his lifetime, though. A chronological approach of such a reception shows that, after being supported by his first spiritual disciples in the 1920s (mainly C. I. Lewis, Morris Cohen and John Dewey after Royce's death), his thought was adopted (through distortion) by the logical positivists settled in the US before the war. In the second half of the century, Peirce was integrated in the official American history in spite of Harvard's reluctancies, and even went through a couple of overenthusiastic decades related to the misunderstandings of structuralism.