Forgotten Little Books of Philosophy, 4

Charles Sanders Peirce and The Fixation of Belief

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Andreu Navarra

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an original thinker, one of those pioneers who sought solitude and intellectual autonomy to such an extent that they ultimately distanced themselves from academic institutions altogether—much like the illustrious George Santayana after him. The son of a Harvard mathematics professor, Peirce is widely regarded not only as the founder of the pragmatic school of thought but also as an explicit source of inspiration for its two most prominent proponents, William James and John Dewey. Even Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have read Peirce’s articles with interest, occasionally drawing on them for his own ideas. By the 1860s, Peirce began publishing essays and delivering lectures on logic, and in the 1870s, he became a member of the influential “Metaphysical Club,” which emerged at Harvard and was later transplanted by Peirce to Johns Hopkins University in 1879.

His series of articles, The Fixation of Belief (1877) and How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), belong to this period and feature incisive reflections such as: “The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know“ or “It is true that, in general, we reason correctly by nature. But this is an accident; the true conclusion would remain true if we had no impulse to accept it, and the false one would remain false, though we could not resist the tendency to believe in it”.

With admirable clarity and apparent simplicity, Peirce engages in dialogue with thinkers such as Aristotle, Spinoza, and Bacon, offering profoundly reasoned insights of great conceptual density:
“Undoubtedly, we are logical animals in the main, but we are not perfectly so”. The spirit of the Greek classics animates these pages, albeit distilled to an extraordinary degree.

Peirce’s conclusions align directly with Enlightenment ideals: “The force of habit will sometimes cause a man to hold on to old beliefs, after he is in a condition to see that they have no sound basis. But reflection upon the state of the case will overcome these habits, and he ought to allow reflection its full weight. People sometimes shrink from doing this, having an idea that beliefs are wholesome which they cannot help feeling rest on nothing”. In The Concept of God, Peirce provided an extensive commentary on Hume’s critique of religion. His themes remain strikingly relevant today, in a world where fatigued societies retreat into facile dogmas, pretending that their surrounding social structures are adequately functional—or, conversely, resign themselves to the belief that all is lost, and it is no longer worth thinking about anything at all.

The Fixation of Belief is, in essence, a small but profound work of fundamental philosophy that has been largely overlooked. Though scholars like Jaime Nubiola and Fernando Zalamea devoted a book to it in 2006 (El camino del pensamiento de Charles Peirce, EUNSA), and it was miraculously reissued by KRK in 2007 with a translation by Lorena Villamil and a foreword by Christopher Hookway, an expert on American pragmatism, it remains a hidden gem in philosophical discourse.

This essay is a meditation on resistance to change, the persistence of theocratic structures, and how fear of reading and independent thought corrupts free societies, reducing them to fanatical tribes. Rediscovering Peirce today serves as a reminder of how we might once again fortify not only democratic reason but also confidence in the scientific method.

I came to Peirce indirectly through annotations by Eugenio d’Ors, and later acquired a compilation volume—a veritable treasure—at a major New York bookstore. This book, which I purchased for the modest sum of sixteen dollars (Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler for Dover Publications, 2022), contains many of Peirce’s seminal texts, graced by his portrait on the cover—a reminder that he was, indeed, a strikingly handsome figure. Among its contents are The Architecture of Theories, The Nature of Mathematics, Essentials of Pragmatism, The Concept of God, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Validity in Reasoning, and Philosophy on the Sciences, among others.

In these works, Peirce engages extensively with thinkers such as Mill, Darwin, Kant, Leibniz, and Berkeley, systematically dismantling errors, illusions, misunderstandings, dualisms, and false conceptions.

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