A native of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Ransdell in 1961 received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California.
He subsequently obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University in New York City, where he wrote his dissertation on Peirce.
Before coming to Texas Tech, Ransdell taught philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Santa Barbara and then spent a year in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, to write his book Pursuit of Wisdom.
On this see in particular Ransdell's "T. L. Short on Peirce's Semeiotic" in Transactions v. 43, n. 4, fall 2007 (Eprint).
Ransdell originated and maintained a large Website Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway and, since 1993, the peirce-l philosophical forum,[2] with four hundred members from three dozen countries, for those interested in Peirce's philosophy.