Charles Sanders Peirce gave the modern world a word — pragmatism — and lived to watch it stolen. What returned to him under that name was looser, friendlier, more obliging than the careful method he had built. So in 1905 he invented an uglier word, pragmaticism, ugly enough, he hoped, that no one would want to kidnap it. The new word changed nothing. The hijacking was complete.

This audiobook is a rescue operation. It returns Peirce to himself — the logician who restructured the symbol of implication, the geodesist who measured gravity with pendulums, the lonely metaphysician of Milford, Pennsylvania, who built a philosophy of signs, chance, continuity, and asymptotic truth. It separates him from his friend William James, who softened him, from John Dewey, who democratized him, and from Richard Rorty, who absorbed him into a conversation without an object.

And it argues that in an age of generative simulation, algorithmic conviction, and post-truth drift, Peirce is not a relic. He is the architect of foundations we have only now begun to need. His semiotics anchors meaning in the world; his abduction grounds creativity in survival; his community of inquirers offers an ethic for a fragmented information age. The era that ignored him was not wiser than he was. It was only faster.