SOURCE: "Charles Sanders Peirce," in Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy, edited by David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb, Jr., Marcus P. Ford, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Peter Ochs, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 166-78.

In the following excerpt, Ochs asserts that Peirce is the first postmodernist philosopher.

By definition, a "logic of postmodernism" would appear to be a contradiction in terms: philosophic post-modernism emerged as a critique of attempts to found philosophy on some principle of reasoning and to found reasoning on some formal guidelines for how we ought to think. Nonetheless, there are two reasons why Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) ought to be labelled the logician of post-modernism—the philosopher who, more than any other, etched out the normative guidelines for postmodern thinking. The first reason is that Peirce attempted to accomplish the impossible, or at least the contradictory. He launched his philosophic career with...