Does 'Peirce' Have a History? A Contribution to a History of the 'Moment of Theory'.

There is not yet, and perhaps never could be, a clear canonical history that makes sense of Charles Sanders Peirce. In this sense, despite the best efforts of Peirce scholarship, Peirce is not 'an author'. A highly technical philosopher who worked on several fronts, he appears to espouse positions that the standard traditions of philosophical debate find difficult to hold together. Partly because of the fragmentary nature of his oeuvre, and partly because of the diversity of his interests, he is often appropriated into projects, these appropriations contributing further to the difficulty of telling a single sense-making story. In this paper, I sketch five stories: 1. Peirce as sui generis, the founder of pragmatism; 2. Peirce as not sui generis - the influences in his work and the conversations of the philosophers in which he participated; 3. Peirce as a philosopher of science, and hence, not compatible with projects in the human sciences and the humanities; 4. Peirce as he was appropriated into the human sciences and the humanities, in the form of semiology and following that, into Derrida's critique of semiology; 5. Peirce retrieved by neo-pragmatism as a weapon against 'French theory'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]