Widely praised as a founder of modern semiotics and of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) spent over forty years developing a philosophical system that addresses the fundamental problems of Western metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Although never formally completed, what emerges from Peirce s writings is a distinctive system that, through an innovative semiotic or theory of signs and cognition, combines a thoroughgoing form of empiricism with a robustly realist metaphysics that emphasizes the mind-independence of laws and other universals. Peirce...