Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce
There is no well-documented explanation of why Peirce adopted the middle name "Santiago" (Spanish for Saint James) but speculations and beliefs of contemporaries and scholars focused on his gratitude to his old friend William James and more recently on Peirce's second wife Juliette (of unknown but possibly Spanish Gypsy heritage).
[6] The claim that Peirce adopted the middle name "Santiago" in gratitude to William James goes back at least to William James's wife Alice, quoted in 1927 by F. C. S. Schiller[7] In one of the last quinquennial catalogues, Peirce changed his middle name from Saunders to Santiago.
Kenneth Laine Ketner (1998,[13] p. 280) cited the 1890 case (and credited Joseph Ransdell for bringing it to his attention[14]) of the heading "Peirce, Charles S(antiago)", which stood above a list of 15 well known C. S. Peirce papers in 11 publications starting on p. 710 in the bibliography for Volume 1 of Ernst Schröder's Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik (1890).
For the letters and papers, see Jaime Nubiola[16] and Jesús Cobo, "The Spanish Mathematician Ventura Reyes Prósper and his connections with Charles S. Peirce and Christine Ladd-Franklin"[17] Joseph Brent (author of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (1993, 1998), history professor emeritus, University of the District of Columbia) claimed to have found, in Manuscript 318, Peirce explaining his motive as being to honor William James, but other scholars did not find it there; Brent suspected a mixup across manuscript numbering systems.
[9] The possibility remains that Peirce in effect revived his (earlier adopted) middle name "Santiago" during some later years (see below) in gratitude to James; but no confirmatory manuscript or publication has been brought to light.
In November 2007, Jaime Nubiola[16] endorsed Joseph Ransdell's view that "It is simply a mystery at this point".
[22] TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN STUART MILL FROM WHOM I FIRST LEARNED THE PRAGMATIC OPENNESS OF MIND AND WHOM MY FANCY LIKES TO PICTURE AS OUR LEADER WERE HE ALIVE TO-DAYI refer to Mr. Charles S. Peirce, with whose very existence as a philosopher I dare say many of you are unacquainted.
He is one of the most original of contemporary thinkers; and the principle of practicalism or pragmatism, as he called it, when I first heard him enunciate it at Cambridge in the early 70s is the clue or compass by following which I find myself more and more confirmed in believing we may keep our feet upon the proper trail.
