REALISM AND IDEALISM IN PEIRCE'S CATEGORIES
abstract
Peirce's categories involve a fundamental ambiguity traceable to the deeper question of his "idealism." While he describes his position as an objective idealism, his psychism shares little of the claims of Hegelianism; it supports, rather, a realist rendering of his categories, for Hegelian idealism repudiates the contingency which Peirce believed kept the universe and our knowledge of it "open."