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[German Version] (Sep 10, 1839, Cambridge, MA – Apr 19, 1914, Milford, PA), father of pragmatism (c. 1878), modern semiotics, and formal logic, probably the most important American philosopher. His philosophical technique is able to combine diverse approaches such as phenomenology and evolutionary cosmology, logical analysis and objective idealism in a formal theory of the structure of experience. His phenomenological theory of categories recognizes three universal, elementary, and complementary c…

[German Version] I. The Term and Its Impact Though there was scattered use of the term in German historiography (Ernst Bernheim) and 19th-century German and French philosophy (Conrad Herrmann, M. Blondel), the concept and term go back to C.S. Peirce (see also II below), who introduced the concept in How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878), the term in 1902 in J. Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, and both orally between 1871 and 1873 ¶ in the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He used the term for a logical maxim that the meaning of concepts must…