Charles Sanders Peirce and the Place of Chaos in the New World Order

This article examines the main ideas of the metaphysics of the prominent American logician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. It is shown that a significant part of his „scientific metaphysics” is evolutionary cosmology, characterized, in particular, by the essential role of randomness in the world. Among the innovative ideas of evolutionary cosmology, the idea of the chaotic beginning of the Universe and constructive understanding of randomness stands out. The paper shows that this idea echoes some modern problems of quantum-relativistic cosmology, and first of all, the problems of the still popular „inflationary model,” in which the idea of the chaotic beginning of the evolution of the Universe is one of the central ones.