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
For the 30th year in a row, our Society is accepting submissions for an essay prize meant to promote the work of a junior scholar. The 2026-2027 Peirce Essay Prize offers a $1,000 cash prize plus up to $1,000 for travel to the Society’s annual meeting to present the winning essay, as well as its publication (subject to editorial revisions) in the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.
Deadline: September 30, 2026
Length: Because the winning essay may be published in the Transactions, the length of the submitted essay should be about the length of an average journal article. The maximum length is 10,000 words, including notes. The presentation of the winning essay at the annual meeting cannot exceed 30 minutes reading time.
Open to: Graduate students and those who are no more than seven years out from the year they earned their last graduate degree, or ten years for those who had extenuating circumstances (e.g. childbirth); please note the extenuating circumstance in the email submission. Past winners of the prize are ineligible. Joint submissions are allowed provided that all authors satisfy the eligibility requirements. The essay may be in any language, provided a 1,000-word summary of it’s argument, written in English, is supplied. The presentation of the paper must be in English and the paper must be translated it into English for publication in the Transactions. Submitted essays must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Advice to Entrants: The winning essay will make a genuine contribution to our understanding of Peirce’s work or its relevance. Therefore, entrants should become familiar with relevant work on or related to Peirce to date and take care to locate their views in relation to that work. Also, scholarly work on Peirce frequently benefits from explicit consideration of the chronological development of his views.
A.I. Statement: Since the aim is to publish the winning essay in the Transactions, submissions should follow the AI policy of the journal, which includes that all use of AI and related machine-learning technologies must be disclosed at the time of submission. We ask entrants to do the same in the submission of their essay to the Peirce Society for consideration for the essay prize.
Submission Instructions: Submitted essays should be prepared for anonymous evaluation. Authors should be sure to remove any identifying information from their document properties. Submissions should be emailed to peircesociety@gmail.com and should include (a) complete contact information, including mailing address and phone numbers, either in the body of the email or in a cover letter, (b) the submitted essay, (c) a CV or statement showing that the entrant meets the eligibility requirements, and (d) Disclosure of any AI use (see above). Any documents should be submitted as email attachments (MS Word or PDF files only). Please include “Peirce Essay Prize Submission” in the subject line of your email.
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”
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