Peirce’s lost community of Firstness

Abstract

Charles Peirce openly described two important communities: his well-known community of inquirers and his less well-known church of love. These communities were closely aligned with his normative sciences, addressing logic and ethics respectively. That left a gap in his architectonic; there is a missing community of Firstness that should correspond to aesthetics, the first of the normative sciences. In this essay, I use Peirce’s writings to speculate about the nature of such a community.