At the end of the 19th century, Josiah Royce participated in what has come to be called the great debate (Royce, 1897; Armour, 2005).1 The great debate concerned issues in metaphysical theology, and, since metaphysics was primarily idealistic, it dealt considerably with the relations between the divine Self and lesser selves. After the great debate, Royce developed his idealism in his Gifford Lectures (1898-1900). These were published as The World and the Individual. At the end of the first volume, Royce (...) added a Supplementary Essay. The Essay, continuing themes from the great debate, developed an intriguing mathematical model of the relations between the divine Self and lesser selves. The second volume went on to.. (shrink)

The power, depth, and humanity of the work and life of Josiah Royce gains in richness by following his reflections on the problems of philosophical pedagogy. While engaged as a professor of philosophy, author, advisor, and administrator, Royce developed and refined guidelines for the philosophy of education, and the art of philosophical pedagogy. Except for a few personal recollections from his students and colleagues, an article by Frank M. Oppenheim that appeared thirty-five years ago, and the annotated bibliography to his (...) writings, Royce's works on pedagogy have not been collected, nor have they received critical attention. The scope of this study is to follow Royce's pedagogical reflections from 1883 to 1913, providing contextual support and critical receptions so that the student of the philosophy of Royce may profit from his studies on the embodiment of ideals as the philosophical engagement of the art of education. (shrink)

Between 1903 and 1913, Royce was recovering from the intensity of having written The World and the Individual. He had experienced family tragedies and an intense lecture schedule, speaking at a variety of American universities as well as at venues abroad. In this period Royce dedicated fewer pieces to the philosophy of pedagogy. These pieces, taken together, closely circumscribe his later works on religion, logic, and ethics. After dedicating lectures and pieces on the psychological underpinnings of pedagogy, and following the (...) publication of Outlines of Psychology (1903), written to help teachers understand the process of learning, Royce again turned to working out his earlier reflections on religious.. (shrink)

In asking to what extent the interaction between pragmatism and phenomenology offers a valuable resource for re-imaging the limits and potentialities of philosophical inquiry, one needs to acknowledge, first, that pragmatist philosophers, beginning with Josiah Royce, actively contributed to the re-elaboration of the issues and strategies of phenomenology in the American context. Secondly, it will be argued that the philosophies of the classical pragmatists, Peirce, Royce, James, and Dewey, contain important resources for creating a new understanding of the human self (...) and of the role of philosophy. We will discuss contributing elements from each of the Classical Pragmatists but focus on the neglected contributions of Josiah Royce. We argue that Royce posits important theses that are valuable to our inquiry: his view of self as “expressive,” i.e. through facial and bodily gestures, through cooperative activities such as art, language, custom, religion, understood via a study of the “expressive signs of mental life”; his idea of science as a thoroughly human enterprise; his belief that habits are common to both physical and mental phenomena; his views on knowledge of other minds and how two minds can know the same thing; and his belief in the social grounding of physical knowledge. (shrink)

This paper proposes an alternative perspective on the question of the relationship between German Idealism and American Pragmatism through attention to the philosophy of Josiah Royce. Despite being seen as a Hegelian, Royce declared himself a pragmatist. However, he also called his position Absolute Voluntarism. This paper suggests that the real issue between Idealism and Pragmatism is Intellectualism vs. Voluntarism. This distinction both parallels and cuts across the traditions of German Idealism and American Pragmatism, and promises to open up a (...) view broader than the traditional accounts of the qualified appreciation of Hegel seen in Peirce and Dewey, or the outright antipathy of James. With Peirce, we see that his continual call for Royce to study logic includes, or complements, his criticisms that Royce neglects Secondness. Regarding James, we see his influence on Royce is mediated also in their mutual study of Wundt’s voluntaristic psychology, which has its own roots in the pre-Kantian German Idealism of Leibniz. As for Dewey, he acknowledges Royce’s voluntarism, but rejects Royce’s claim that his Absolute Pragmatism/Voluntarism is pragmatism at all. Nonetheless, even if Royce failed to fuse his idealism and pragmatism, the very effort suggests he saw them as distinct enough to need fusion. (shrink)