Academics Will Gather, Discuss Alumnus's Work

More than 200 scholars of everything from mathematics to metaphysics will in two years gather at Harvard for an international conference to honor an 1859 College graduate whose interests spanned many academic disciplines, officials said yesterday.

Organizers said the conference, funded by a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), will aim to apply to contemporary intellectual debate the wide-ranging thought of chemist, philosopher and mathematician Charles S. Peirce.

Harvard will conduct the event, entitled "Peirce and Contemporary Thought: the C.S. Peirce Sesquicentennial International Congress," with Texas Tech University in the fall of 1989.

Texas Tech was the University's partner in formulating the Peirce proposal, which won the largest NEH grant ever awarded for a conference.

Although the conference will be aimed at the academic community, the conditions of the NEH grant stipulate that it must be open to the public, said Professor of Philosophy Hilary W. Putnam, who authored the proposal.

Though dozens of volumes of his work are preserved in Houghton Library, scholars said that Peirce is not a familiar figure.

A worldwide renaissance of Peirce's ideas helped spark the international gathering, said Israel Scheffler, Thomas Professor of Education and Philosophy.

"The conference will serve to further disseminate his ideas," said Scheffler, a member of the committee that organized the conference.

"The breadth and power of his ideas have captured the world," he said, adding that conference participants "use his work as a springboard for new development."

The conference will include segments on linguistics, mathematics, semiotics, philosophy, and the history of science, all fields to which Peirce contributed.

It will feature such speakers as famed Italian author and linguist Umberto Eco as well as presentations from academics.