Josiah Royce

The study of community is an integral part of pragmatist thought, as is the continual reminder to reconstruct and re-evaluate our theories in light of changing conditions. A contemporary, literal, and significant source of changing conditions is anthropogenic global climate change, conjoined with a general increase in concern for non-human life. Already, a great deal of work has been done on applying pragmatist conceptions and insights to these issues.1 However, other pragmatist resources remain to be marshaled. One such resource is (...) Josiah Royce’s philosophy of insurance, which, while primarily offered as a way of preventing international conflicts, also concerned the mitigation of natural calamities, such as.. (shrink)

Josiah Royce’s The Problem of Christianity has been studied in numerous ways since its publication in 1913. The most common approaches to studying PC among historians of classical American philosophy and Royce scholars are to regard it as a contribution to the psychology of religion, as a contribution to philosophy of religion, or as an application of Royce’s logical theory to the study of religion. Scholars who study PC as a contribution to the psychology of religion often emphasize such things (...) as the continuity between Royce’s phenomenological description of a range of religious insights in The Sources of Religious Insight and his... (shrink)

In this article, I contend that there are at least two contemporary types of Kantian transcendental pragmatism: Sami Pihlström’s naturalistic transcendentalpragmatism and Josiah Royce’s absolute pragmatism. Each one of these transcendental pragmatisms represents one side of the Kantian transcendentaltradition. Pihlström’s naturalistic transcendental pragmatism represents the side of the Kantian transcendental tradition that is familiar to most philosophers, namely, the transcendental inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of human experience. Royce’s absolute pragmatism represents the other, more neglected, side of the (...) Kantian transcendental tradition, namely, the transcendental analysis of the meaningfulness of moral, aesthetic, and religious experience, especially theistic religious experience. I contend that Royce’s pragmatism is more representative of the Kantian transcendental tradition than is Pihlström’s pragmatism. (shrink)

This paper aims to sever the tie between Josiah Royce's ethico-religious insight and his idiosyncratic absolutistic idealism. The first section of this paper sets the stage for this severance by explaining what it is that Royce's ethico-religious insight needs to be separated from: his absolutistic idealism and its conception of God. This explanation will consist mainly of a concise description of Royce's phenomenology of concept formation in chapter nine of his Religious Aspect of Philosophy and a critical exegesis of his (...) 1895 Berkeley lecture, "The Conception of God." The second section of this paper actually severs the tie between Royce's ethico-religious insight and his absolutistic conception of God via a Marcellian critique of Royce's conception of God. The third section of this paper places Royce's ethico-religious insight in a more hospitable environment — namely, the philosophical orbit of a Marcellian existential phenomenology. (shrink)

This essay examines how, in the early twentieth century, ontological arguments were employed in the defense of metaphysical idealism. The idealists of the period tended to grant that ontological arguments defy our usual expectations in logic, and so they were less concerned with the formal properties of Anselmian arguments. They insisted, however, that ontological arguments are indispensable, and they argued that we can trust argumentation as such only if we presume that there is a valid ontological argument. In the first (...) section I outline the history of this metalogical interpretation of the ontological argument. In the subsequent sections I explain how Royce and Collingwood each developed the argument, and how this impacted their respective conceptions of both logic and metaphysics. (shrink)

While it is widely acknowledged that Martin Luther King’s notion of the “Beloved Community” owes the origin of its name to Josiah Royce, what has not been noticed in the literature on the subject is the depth of the connection between King’s and Royce’s conception of such a community. It is known that King studied Royce as a graduate student at Boston University, and that his advisors -- both Edgar Sheffield Brightman and L. Harrold DeWolf -- were intimately familiar with (...) Royce's works. This article will explore those connections and make explicit the extent to which King's concept itself (and not merely the name) of the Beloved Community is rooted in Royce's development of the concept, especially as this is found in Royce's The Problem of Christianity. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to the criticisms that Richard Royce has made of my theory of competition in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. While I find some of his attacks misplaced, a number of his criticisms address key difficulties to which I offer clarification and defense.

This article aims to clarify how these two thinkers interacted philosophically to develop, challenge and enrich each other's thinking. To this end, the article employs a chronological order, tighter than Perry's, of six periods of interaction: Royce's pre-Harvard period, four at Harvard, and one after James's death. Pertinent to the genesis of James's will-to-believe doctrine, in his "Principles of Psychology" James credited Royce's account of the psychology of belief as the clearest he knew. When James later compared Bradley's "Appearance and (...) Reality" with Royce's self-confessedly "hasty and unsound" "Conception of God", James's suspicions about Royce's argument for the "absolute" were further aroused. (shrink)

An official letter reporting the unauthorized Ph.D. examination at Harvard University of Mary Whiton Calkins records the anomalous position which women have occupied in philosophy from the beginning.

Interpretations of Peirce’s development after 1898 often mix three kinds of arguments: one argument about belief, one argument about philosophy and practice, and one argument about the causal role of James’s writings on Peirce’s development. I shall focus here on the last two points: theory and practice and the alleged role of James. James’s role in Peirce’s development is somewhat overestimated and one can doubt Peirce’s worries about the dogmatic use of the scientific method and of philosophy in morals are (...) conditioned by James’s writings only. Peirce’s re-readings and refinements of his Illustrations started no later than the early 1880s, at a time when James was not as central a reference as it became after 1900 for the philosophic stage. To support that claim, I wish to focus here on one particular point: the distrust towards those who try to “mingle” philosophy and practice is by no means a new theme in the 1890s. One of the most telling examples of such a claim is the 1885 review of Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, some thirteen years before the quarrel over pragmatism started. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have increasingly paid attention to the philosophy of Josiah Royce. Long lost in the shadow of fellow classical American figures, Royce’s philosophy has enjoyed a renascence, with a spate of publications in a variety of venues studying and applying his thought.1 Like his philosophical brethren, Royce wrote on a wide variety of subjects, his discussions underpinned by a smattering of influences. Much has been remarked of the various Western sources that made an impression on Royce’s thought, (...) but comparatively little has been said of his indebtedness to Eastern sources. Kurt Leidecker’s Josiah Royce and Indian Thought2 and Frank M... (shrink)

The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce.

Can we prove the reality of the Absolute? If so, how is it possible to defend the individuality and freedom of human selves as genuine? This thesis explores Royce's responses to these questions by examining three pivotal texts that trace the development of his thought. ;Chapter one examines Royce's initial proof of the reality of the Absolute. He argues that a critical analysis of the possibility of error leads inevitably to an acknowledgment of the reality of the Absolute. Chapter two (...) examines Royce's attempt to use models of recurrence and self-representation to articulate the nature of the relation between non-absolute individuals and the Absolute. Chapter three examines his attempt to refigure this relation, as well as his view of the Absolute, in terms of the idea of a universal community of interpretation. Finally, chapter four argues that Royce's response to these questions fail because at each stage in the development of his thought Royce's approach is overdetermined from a formal point of view. I argue that, in order to bring his project to a successful completion, we need to incorporate a non-formal, performative dimension into Royce's view of the human self and his view of the Absolute. (shrink)

This dissertation seeks to develop Josiah Royce's moral theory, especially as it appears in The Philosophy of Loyalty and several unpublished papers on the notion of loyalty, and to use this theory to address certain problems pertaining to the practice of medicine. ;It begins by addressing medicine's moral tradition and noting that it contains several incompatible elements. The problems created by these incompatibilities are exacerbated, it is shown, by several recent developments, including the proliferation of medical technologies, the popularity of (...) moral relativism and an increasingly impersonal institutional structure in medicine. The need to revise the tradition becomes apparent, and Royce's moral theory is developed in order to help in this task. ;Royce's notion of loyalty to loyalty is examined and used as the basis for several general guidelines for revising moral traditions. These guidelines are applied to medicine's tradition. The notion of "the greater medical community" emerges. The greater medical community is the community of all persons interested in utilizing and/or advancing medical knowledge and technologies, to the end of alleviating or mitigating human suffering. ;It is through the imperative of loyalty to the greater medical community that medicine's moral tradition is reenvisaged. This task is carried out on both a theoretical and a practical level, and includes a discussion of how Royce's theory is superior to several alternative theories of medical ethics. The dissertation concludes by sketching some of the subvirtues of loyalty that could be relevant to the practice of medicine. (shrink)

This study deals with the philosophical import of Royce's psychological theories, as these lead to the development of an ethical concept of the self that receives expression in the philosophy of loyalty. I analyze the cognitive and social psychologies, with particular emphasis on the problem of their integration, as evidenced by Royce's sustained effort, from the early 1880's to the twentieth century, to harmonize the internal-temporal with the external-social aspects of selfhood. I hold that the solution to this problem comes (...) through the elaboration of a logical definition of individuality that strongly relies on the psychology of attention. Of additional interest is the discussion of the philosophical import of certain little-known aspects of Royce's production, such as the psychology of imitation, the bearing of psychology on the interpretation of American problems and ideals, and the relation between originality, selfhood and the unconscious. This last topic includes a discussion of the influence of Royce's philosophy on the psychoanalytical theory and practice of James Jackson Putnam, leader of the Boston group of physicians and psychotherapists who introduced Freudian ideas in the U.S.A. ;The approach to Royce's thought from the perspective of psychology makes it possible to bring out the strength of his emphasis on the concrete and experiential aspects of life and the presence of a phenomenological vein running through his philosophy. This opens the way for us to envision his idealism as one that, seeking at all times to conquer the spirit of abstraction, was able to side-step two excesses: that of monism and that of atomism, by showing that an isolated individual is as much of an abstraction as a conceptual totality. Royce's concept of the human self aligns him against individualism and in favor of pluralism, because he starts out with the individual self, not the isolated self. It is on this basis that he is able to develop a psychosocial conception of selfhood that can sustain an ethics of freedom and individuality, and do justice as well to the moral requirement of allegiance to social goals. (shrink)

In Reconstruction in Philosophy, John Dewey argued that "the distinctive office, problems, and subjectmatter of philosophy grow out of stresses and strains in the community life in which a given form of philosophy arises, $\dots$" This dissertation attempts to locate the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, and John Dewey in a tradition of American philosophy which places work in philosophy in relation to its context in the life of the larger community. It is argued that this tradition harbors (...) a neglected, yet viable understanding of philosophy, and that a reconstructive approach can shed light on contemporary issues. The first chapter examines Dewey's call for reconstruction, his understanding of philosophy as criticism, and his theory of communication. Some problems with Dewey's instrumentalist language are examined. The second chapter attempts to trace the origins of the reconstructive view to Peirce's work in general and his theory of the community of inquiry in particular. The third chapter takes up Royce's theory of interpretation and of community as it appears in The Problem of Christianity. The fourth chapter examines developments of Royce's theory of community on writings on social concerns of his day, compares Royce's view with Dewey's, and examines some parallels between Royce's work and the sociological analysis of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality. The fifth chapter attempts to use a reconstruction approach to sketch strategies for the problem of the unity of the academic community, cultural literacy as a condition for participation in community, and the responsibility of the professional to the community. The dissertation argues that Josiah Royce's theory of interpretation and community avoids certain problems inherent in Dewey's approach, and provides a better way to understand the relationships among the various projects of inquiry and interpretation which are sustained and supported by the community. (shrink)

The popular mind is deep and means a thousand times more than it knows. It is fitting that the Royal Institute of Philosophy series on American philosophy include a session on the thought of Josiah Royce, for his most formidable philosophical work, The World and the Individual , was a result of his Gifford lectures in the not too distant city of Aberdeen in 1899 and 1900. The invitation to offer the Gifford lectures was somewhat happenstance, for it was extended (...) originally to William James, who pleaded, as he often did in his convenient neurasthenic way, to postpone for a year on behalf of his unsettled nerves. James repaired himself to the Swiss home of Theodore Flournoy, with its treasure of books in religion and psychology, so as to write his Gifford lectures, now famous as The Varieties of Religious Experience . In so doing, however, James was able to solicit an invitation for Royce to occupy the year of his postponement. Royce accepted with alacrity, although this generosity of James displeased his wife Alice, who ranted, ‘Royce!! He will not refuse, but over he will go with his Infinite under his arm, and he will not even do honour to William's recommendation.’ Alice was partially correct in that Royce, indeed, did carry the Infinite across the ocean to the home of his intellectual forebears, although on that occasion as on many others, he acknowledged the support of his personal and philosophical mentor, colleague and friend, William James. (shrink)

Royce's theory of moral obligation developed through four distinct phases: an early pragmatic phase culminating in his adoption of a Kantian ethical framework; a dialectical phase, around 1885, consequent upon Royce's movement to objective idealism and involving major alteration in Royce's architectonic; a phase in which selfhood as the preeminent ethical category, combined with a set theoretic logic, led Royce to view the individual as a subset of the absolute self ; and a final phase, from 1908 until Royce's death (...) in 1916, in which the ethical relations of individuals to communities and of communities to yet higher communities provide the foundation for an ethics of interpretation. ;Although Royce's ethical obligation theory retained a markedly Kantian form throughout all four periods, Royce's depiction of ethical relationships became increasingly complex. In the earlier phases this increased complexity resulted from changes in Royce's epistemological and ontological views. In the final two periods, however, Royce's ethics became an independent source of change within his philosophic system as a whole. In his essay on "The Absolute and the Individual" , Royce modified his metaphysics with a theory of will, ethical individuation and freedom: the result was a "moralization" of his idea of the absolute and a changed view of the relation of finite individuals to the absolute self. Two novel elements in The Philosophy of Loyalty --the individual's loyalty to a cause, and the relation of these individual loyalties to an overarching religious reality--are key elements in Royce's transition from the third to the fourth phases, for Royce developed a theory of community on the basis of a two levels doctrine derived from the self/cause distinction. Royce completed his view of the community with the addition of a theory of interpretation drawn from the early work of Charles Sanders Peirce on the triadic nature of signs; and in the final two years of his life appears to have been moving toward a theory of moral obligation based on these triadic interpretive relations. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine the solutions to the problem of evil in relation to God proposed by Josiah Royce and John Hick--solutions which maintain that evil is necessary for moral and spiritual development. Hick and Royce were chosen because as strong advocates of this view, they, nevertheless, represent contrasting conceptions of God. Royce was a philosophical idealist, while Hick represents Christian theism. ;I first isolated the usual problems for theism with regard to evil and considered the (...) weaknesses of the usual explanations. Then I developed Royce's idealistic conception of God which he claimed avoided those weaknesses. Next I set forth his theodicy and critically evaluated it. Having completed my analysis of Royce, I turned to Hick's conception of God and his theodicy, comparing the latter with Royce's and critically evaluating it. Finally, I summarized the main points of the type of theodicy represented by Royce and Hick and followed this with a summary of the main problems. ;Royce maintained that God suffers in order to be perfect. Moral and spiritual perfection consists not of innocence but of overcoming evil. Because human selves are fragments of God's life, God suffers in us and through us. Hick also maintained that developed moral and spiritual character is superior to a preestablished state. Therefore, God brought humans into existence in an undeveloped state and maintained an epistemic distance from them in order that they might develop freely. Thus, in both Royce and Hick, the conditions that make evil a virtual inevitability are necessary. ;The major findings of this study were that the type of theodicy advocated by Royce and Hick suffers from serious weaknesses. God is absolutely good but requires evil to accomplish the divine purpose. A large degree of moral and spiritual development does not require evil, yet God who is absolutely good requires it for development. Excessive evil is admitted to be a mystery and yet this mystery is also used by God. The final outcome of the process either requires abandoning the original necessary conditions or has no redemptive value on an individual basis. (shrink)