An
American philosopher from the late nineteenth century,
Peirce (pronounced "purse") was a chemist who spent three hours a day for two years studying
Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason. He put it down and said "now I shall do philosophy as Kant would've done it IF HE'D KNOWN A DAMN THING ABOUT LOGIC!"
Peirce is regarded as the father of the school of American pragmatism. Coming from a scientific background, he was very familiar with the empirical method, and sought to use it and logic to reveal larger truths about philosophy. He is generally associated with 'falliblism', a school of thought that attempts to use to the empirical method to establish how we can know something (in an epistemologiclly secure way) at one time, and be wrong at another.