Today, C.S. Peirce is considered to be one of America's most brilliant thinkers. In addition to his writings on Pragmatism, he was a brilliant logician, and he did interesting work in semiotics -- the theory of signs -- that contemporary thinkers find very exciting.

During his own lifetime, however, Peirce was largely unknown, and he spent much of his life in poverty. Peirce was unable to keep a teaching job at Johns Hopkins University because he took a gypsy as a mistress and then married her. Due to Peirce's poverty in his later life, William James occasionally collected money from other scholars to try to support him.

Although James credited Peirce with being the father of Pragmatism, Peirce disliked James's version of Pragmatism and took to calling his philosophy Pragmaticism instead.