pragmatism

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, widely regarded as the founder of pragmatism and one of the most original minds in the history of Western philosophy. Though he spent much of his career in relative institutional isolation—he held no permanent academic post and much of his work was published only posthumously—his influence on logic, semiotics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science has proven immense. Peirce was educated at Harvard and worked for decades with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, conducting pioneering research in geodesy and the measurement of gravity. In parallel, he developed a sweeping philosophical system he called “synechism”—the view that continuity is a fundamental feature of reality—alongside “tychism,” the doctrine that genuine chance is real and irreducible in the cosmos. These were not idle speculations but part of a rigorous effort to understand how mind, matter, meaning, and evolution are woven together. His theory of signs (semiotics) proposed that all thought is mediated by signs, making inquiry itself a kind of living, self-correcting process oriented toward truth. Peirce’s cosmological vision is among the most theologically resonant in the American philosophical tradition. He argued that the universe itself is a process of mind coming to know itself—that evolution, continuity, and the growth of reasonableness are not merely biological or physical facts but expressions of a cosmic tendency toward greater intelligence, order, and love. He described this tendency with the term “agapasm”: evolutionary love as the animating force of the universe. In this light, his remark that creation’s purpose, in its highest expression, is “God’s movement toward self-reproduction” is not a peripheral aside but a central conviction—that the cosmos is oriented toward the emergence and amplification of mind, and that intelligence, creativity, and moral aspiration are participations in something genuinely divine. For those who hold that humanity’s destiny is theosis—transformation into ever greater intelligence, compassion, and creative power—Peirce’s cosmology offers a richly consonant philosophical foundation.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) was an American jurist and legal scholar who served on the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. Born in Boston, he was the son of the physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. He graduated from Harvard College in 1861, served as a Union officer during the Civil War, and was wounded three times. After the war, he studied at Harvard Law School and entered legal practice in Boston. Holmes combined practice with editing, teaching, and scholarship. In The Common Law (1881), he examined the historical development of legal rules and argued that experience, social conditions, and practical judgments shape the law. He briefly held a professorship at Harvard Law School before joining the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1882. He became its chief justice in 1899. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the United States Supreme Court in 1902. His judicial opinions helped shape debates about constitutional interpretation, legislative authority, and freedom of speech. His dissent in Lochner v. New York (1905) opposed imposing a particular economic theory through constitutional adjudication. His later free-speech dissents, including Abrams v. United States (1919), influenced the development of stronger protections for political expression. His writing also contributed to the intellectual foundations of American legal realism. Holmes's record includes decisions that severely restricted individual rights. In Buck v. Bell (1927), he wrote the majority opinion upholding Virginia's compulsory sterilization law, lending judicial authority to eugenics and its coercive treatment of disabled people. His legacy therefore encompasses both influential arguments for intellectual freedom and grave failures to protect vulnerable individuals. He retired in 1932 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1935.

Samo Burja is a Slovenian-American social scientist and entrepreneur best known for Great Founder Theory, an account of how institutions rise, decay, and occasionally renew themselves through the work of a small number of people who genuinely understand how those institutions function. He is the founder and president of Bismarck Analysis, a research firm that studies the hidden mechanics of governments, companies, and other organizations, and a contributing editor at Palladium Magazine, where much of his writing on civilization, elite competence, and institutional knowledge first appeared. Burja’s central distinction, between “live players” who actively grasp and can rebuild the systems they lead and “dead players” who merely execute inherited scripts without knowing why they work, has become a widely cited lens for understanding why organizations that look stable on paper can hollow out from within. He argues that formal structures, laws, and credentials often outlast the tacit, living knowledge that originally made them work, so that a society can appear intact while quietly losing the capacity to renew itself. Much of his public work, through essays, long-form interviews, and his Bismarck Brief newsletter, traces this pattern across empires, corporations, and scientific fields, asking what it takes for a civilization not merely to persist but to keep producing people capable of founding anew. That question of renewal through genuine understanding, rather than habit or formality, resonates with a Mormon Transhumanist conviction that progression requires active, informed stewardship rather than passive inheritance. Burja writes from a secular and institutional vantage rather than a theological one, but his insistence that civilizations survive only through people who truly comprehend and continue the work of creation offers a striking, if independently arrived at, echo of the call to be active participants in an ongoing restoration rather than custodians of a finished system.

William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, widely regarded as the father of American psychology and one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A founding figure of pragmatism, James taught at Harvard for decades, where his work shaped philosophy, psychology, and the study of religion in ways that continue to reverberate. James’s contributions span an extraordinary range. His landmark Principles of Psychology (1890) established psychology as a rigorous empirical discipline. His philosophical writings—including The Will to Believe , Pragmatism , and A Pluralistic Universe —developed a vision of truth as something made rather than merely found, tested in lived experience and practical consequence. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he brought the same empirical seriousness to mysticism, conversion, and faith, treating religious experience as genuine data about human consciousness and its possibilities. What animates James’s legacy, and gives it enduring resonance, is his insistence that ideas must be tested against the full weight of human life—its dangers, its moral demands, its capacity for transformation. His account of the “strenuous mood”—the awakening of our deepest energies in response to genuine stakes and infinite demands—captures something essential about the relationship between faith and moral agency. For James, a world without God risks collapsing into a “don’t-care” temperament; religious faith, by opening an infinite scale of obligation and possibility, frees “every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils.” This is not theology as mere comfort but as a spur to transformation. His vision of cooperative moral adventure—a world whose perfection is “conditional merely” on whether each agent does their “level best”—frames human existence as a genuinely open, participatory project, one where trust, risk, and collaborative effort are constitutive of whatever good is achieved. That vision sits naturally alongside Mormon transhumanist convictions about theosis, participatory atonement, and humanity’s co-creative role in its own divine future.