Charles Sanders Peirce is quickly becoming the dominant figure in the history of American philosophy. The breadth and depth of his work has begun to obscure even the brightest of his contemporaries. Concerning the interpretation of his work, however, there are two distinct schools. The first holds that Peirce's work is an aggregate of important but disconnected insights. The second school argues that his work is a systematic philosophy with many pieces of the overall picture still obscure or missing. It is this second view which seems to me the most reasonable, in part because it has been convincingly defended by other scholars, but most importantly because Peirce himself described his philosophy as systematic: What I would recommend is that every person who wishes to form an opinion concerning fundamental problems should first of all make a complete survey of human knowledge, should take note of all the valuable ideas in each branch of science, should observe in just what respect each has been successful and where it has failed, in order that, in the light of the thorough acquaintance so attained of the available materials for a philosophical theory and of the nature and strength of each, he may proceed to the study of what the problem of philosophy consists in, and of the proper way of solving it (6. 9) [1].

The American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce, best known as the founder of pragmatism, has been influential not only in the pragmatic tradition but more recently in the philosophy of science and the study of semiotics, or sign theory. Strands of System provides an accessible overview of Peirce's systematic philosophy for those who are beginning to explore his thinking and its import for more recent trends in philosophy.

"The reader will find that I combine hearty enthusiasm for the philosophical traditions of my country with sharp partial disagreement with nearly all their representatives. My effort throughout my career has been to think about philosophical, that is, essentially a priori or metaphysical, issues, using the history of ideas as a primary resource. "This is the second of two volumes dealing with the history of philosophy, especially of metaphysics. The first, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, discusses some thirty European philosophers, from Democritus to Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. In both volumes I try to learn and teach truth about reality by arguing, in a fashion, with those who in the past have sought such truth." — Charles Hartshorne In a remarkable tour de force, Charles Hartshorne presents a lively and illuminating study of what major American philosophers have said about creativity. With a special talent for perceiving and elegantly expressing the essence of a position, Dr. Hartshorne details his reactions to friend and foe, demonstrating that philosophy at its best is dialogue. Noting that metaphysics is a major theme in the American philosophical tradition, he states that "nowhere has the topic been more persistently and searchingly investigated than in this country."

The book investigates the topic of creativity by focusing on C.S. Peirce's and A.N. Whitehead's accounts of novelty. It is divided into three parts. The first part considers the problem of novelty from a philosophical point of view and examines the historical and theoretical connections between the two authors. The second and third parts explore, respectively, Peirce's and Whitehead's thoughts on novelty, analyzing their views from three different perspectives - phenomenological, gnoseological, and cosmological. Finally, their thoughts are compared in order to show their contributions to the issue of novelty.

With the present volume, the presentation of Peirce's philosophical thought reaches its metaphysical culmination. It embodies the effort of the founder of Pragmatism to develop a metaphysics which will conform to the canons of scientific method, and at the same time provide for real novelty, objective universal laws of nature, cosmical and biological evolution, feeling, and mind. To his previously published papers on chance, continuity, God, and other metaphysical themes, the editors have added a considerable number of unpublished manuscripts which clarify and develop the implications of Peirce's fundamental world-view. The volume contains those speculative views of Peirce which so deeply influenced his contemporaries, including his discussions of tychism and synechism and of the religious aspects of metaphysics.

The present collection focuses primarily on Peirce's realism, pragmatism, and theism, with attention also being paid to his tychism (or doctrine of objective chance) and synechism (or insistence upon the reality and irreducibility of continuity). In exhibiting the connections among these doctrines, the collection reveals a unity of its own. The essays themselves are readily accessible and lucid, though neither accessibility nor lucidity is purchased at the price of subtlety or vigor.