The Society sponsors an annual essay contest. Graduate students and recent Ph.D. degree holders are invited to submit high-quality research papers on any aspect of Charles S. Peirce’s work. The essay contest winner receives a monetary prize, is invited to present the essay at the annual meeting of the Society, and is allowed to submit it for publication in the Society’s journal.
Call for Papers: 2026 – 2027 Charles S. Peirce Essay Prize is Coming Soon
2025
Winner: Aames, Jimmy (Kobe University, Japan), “Peirce’s Tychism and the Non-Euclidean Nature of Physical Space”
2024
Winner: Roe, Niall (Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge), “Charles Peirce and Experimental Science”
2023
Winner: Monti, Rocco (Roma Tre University /Ecole Normale Superieure), “Charles S. Peirce and the Origins of Vagueness”
2022
Winner: Metzger, Scott (McMaster University), “Qualifying the Reduction of Illation to Sign Relation: The Roots of Peirce’s General Theory of Signs”
2021
Winner: Andrade, Bernardo (Emory University), “Peirce’s Imaginative Community: On the Esthetic Grounds of Inquiry”
2020
Winner: Odland, Brent (McMaster University), “Peirce’s Triadic Logic: Modality and Continuity”
2019
Winner: MacDonald, Ian (University of Waterloo), “Did Peirce Misrepresent Descartes? Reinvestigating and Defending Peirce’s Case”
2018
Winner: Levesque, Simon (Université du Québec à Montréal), “Abduction as Regulation: An Input from Epigenetics”
2017
Winner: Cashmore, Sarah (University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), “In Search of a Pedagogy of Change through the Developmental Teleology of Charles Sanders Peirce”
2016
Winner: Gaultier, Benoit (Collège de France), “The Iconicity of Thought and its Moving Pictures: Following the Sinuosities of Peirce’s Path”
Honorable mention: Aames, Jimmy (IU Bloomington), “On the Double Function of the Interpretant”
Honorable mention: Boyd, Kenneth (Toronto), “Peirce, Ladd-Franklin, and the Development of the Proposition”
2015
Winner: Bellucci, Francesco (Tallinn University of Technology), “Inferences from Signs. Peirce and the Recovery of the σημεῖον”
Honorable mention: Boyd, Kenneth (Dalhousie University), Heney, Diana (Fordham University), “Rascals, Triflers, and Scientists: C. S. Pierce and the Centrality of Assertion”
Honorable mention: Cristalli, Claudia (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy), “Is Perception like Signal Detection? Peirce’s Philosophical and Scientific Inquiry on Perception and Its Analogies with a Modern Hypothesis on Cognition”
2014
Winner: Wilson, Aaron (South Texas College), “Peirce and the A Priori”
Honorable mention: McAuliffe, William (Miami), “How did Abduction get Confused with Inference to the Best Explanation?”
Honorable mention: Liuhua, Zhang (East China Normal University), “A Plea for a Peircean Turn in Justifying Logic”
2013
Winner: Gava, Gabriele (Germany), “What is Wrong with Intuitions? An Assessment of a Peircean Criticism of Kant”
2012
Winner: Ishida, Masato (USA), “A Peircean Reply to Quine’s Two Problems”
2011
Winner: Chevalier, Jean-Marie (France), “Peirce’s Critique of the First Critique: A Leibnizian False Start”
2010
Winner: Atkins, Richard (USA), “This Proposition is not True: C.S. Peirce and the Liar Paradox”
2009
Winner: Smith, Andrew F. (USA), “Truth, Negation, and the Limit of Inquiry: Revisiting the Problem of Buried Secrets”
2008
Winner: Campos, Daniel (USA), “Imagination, Concentration, and Generalization: Peirce on the Reasoning Abilities of the Mathematician”
2007
Winner: McKaughan, Daniel (USA), “From Ugly Duckling to Swan: C. S. Peirce, Abduction, and the Pursuit of Scientific Theories”
2006
Winner: Havenel, Jérôme (France), “Peirce’s Clarifications on Continuity”
2005
Winner: Dea, Shannon (Canada), “’Merely a Veil Over the Living Thought’: Math and Logic in Peirce’s Forgotten Spinoza Review”
2004
Winner: Kaag, John Jacob (USA), “Continuity and Inheritance: Kant’s Critique of Judgement and the Work of C.S. Peirce”
2003
Winner: Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko (Finland), “Peirce’s Magic Lantern: Moving Pictures of Thought”
2002
Winner: Girel, Mathias (France), “The Metaphysics and Logic of Psychology: Peirce’s Reading of James’s Principles”
2001
Winner: Norman, Jesse (England), “Provability in Peirce’s Alpha Graphs”
2000
Winner: Hulswit, Menno (the Netherlands), “Semeiotic and the Cement of the Universe: A Peircean Process Approach to Causation”
1999
Winner: Bergman, Mats (Finland), “Reflections on the Role of the Communicative Sign in Semeiotic”
1998
Winner: Kasser, Jeffrey (USA), “Peirce’s Supposed Psychologism”
1997
Winner: Pihlstrom, Sami (Finland), “Peircean Scholastic Realism and Transcendental Arguments”
1996
Winner: Herron, Timothy (USA), “C. S. Peirce’s Theory of Infinitesimals”
Winner: Lane, Robert (USA), “Peirce’s ‘Entanglement’ with the Principles of Excluded Middle and Contradiction”
The Charles S. Peirce Society 