#  James Clerk Maxwell and Charles Sanders Peirce: When 19th Century British Physics met Harvard Metaphysics 

 



    ![James Clerk Maxwell_Charles Sanders Peirce](/sites/g/files/omnuum986/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2026-11/Social%20Workers_%20Advancing%20the%20Profession_0.jpg?itok=qV4vAAIt) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 17, 2026** 

 05:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **RCCHU Conference Room**  

 [26 Trowbridge Street  
Cambridge, MA 02139  
United States



 ](<https://www.google.com/maps?q=US MA Cambridge 02139 26 Trowbridge Street>) 



 

 [ Zoom link arrow\_circle\_right ](https://zoom.us/j/92932317628?pwd=eXucGaz1rieCJFMUo6541JzO0DnEuW.1) 

 



 

The speaker's project at Real Colegio Complutense (RCC) involves working on a slim book commissioned by Oxford University Press on the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). It describes the development of electromagnetism and statistical mechanics by Maxwell and the ‘Maxwellians’, and their impact upon the scientific culture of the time. The seminar first outlines the contents of the book, focusing in particular on three core claims: that a modeling attitude emerges in the second half of the 19th century; that this attitude has distinctive roots in the Scottish enlightenment; and that it signifies the beginning of the two-cultures schism that to this day separates the sciences and the humanities. Mauricio then announce his next project to bridge the schism at its inception, by looking over the Atlantic at the emergence at Harvard of *pragmatism* – the quintaessential American philosophy originating at meetings of the so-called *Metaphysical Club* in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the 1870s. Mauricio finds that the key founder of pragmatism as a philosophy of scientific inquiry, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914), not only was a great admirer of James Clerk Maxwell, but actively sought his interlocution. There is evidence that Peirce travelled to England, to the older Cambridge, with the main goal of meeting Maxwell, and that the pair in fact met briefly there, at Maxwell’s Cavendish Laboratory, on or around April 20, 1875. Mauricio will close by briefly imagining their conversation that day, and conjecture that a source of the pragmatic maxim (which Peirce announced to the world only three years later, in 1878) may well lie in the Scottish modeling attitude imparted by the Maxwellians.

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

 ![James Clerk Maxwell_Charles Sanders Peirce](/sites/g/files/omnuum986/files/2026-11/Social%20Workers_%20Advancing%20the%20Profession_0.jpg)

 

Speaker: **Mauricio Suárez** *(Universidad Complutense &amp; Clare Hall Cambridge, UK)*





 

 



 

 

 Share on:- [     Facebook ](#)
- [     Twitter ](#)
- [     Linkedin ](#)
 


 Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://rcc.harvard.edu/node/1578221/event-feed.ics)  Copy link link