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"Royce, Josiah"
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Josiah Royce, William James, and the Social Renewal of the “Sick Soul”: Exploring the Communal Dimension of Religious Experience
In The Sources of Religious Insight, Josiah Royce assesses William James’ pragmatic evaluation of exalted, private religious experience, advanced in The Varieties of Religious Experience as inadequate to encompass the full range of religious experience. Among other contributions, Royce adds social and communal experience to James’ individualistic appraisal. Rather than tacking on to the familiar contemporary critical conversation about the Jamesian restriction to private experience, I argue that James and Royce are helpfully brought together through an understanding of religious conversion: James’ foundational predicament of the “sick soul” returned to health through religious conversion gains depth and coherence through the attention Royce gives to overcoming alienation through communal participation. In our time of dislocation and self-preoccupation, drawing together these two seminal models of religious experience provides an instructive account of the individual’s transformation by way of communal renewal.
Journal Article
Josiah Royce's Absolute Semiotics: Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Error
Scholars often argue that Charles Sanders Peirce was responsible for Josiah Royce's semiotic turn in The Problem of Christianity of 1913. Thus scholars tend to assume that a Roycean approach to semiotics was a later development and derives almost entirely from Peirce's semiotics. Far from a later development, Royce probably read Peirce much earlier. Indeed, even before Royce had read Peirce, the kernel of a Rocyean approach to semiotics is found in the dissertation of 1878. Thus the present essay will prove that a Roycean approach to semiotics did not have a basis in Peirce's semiotics, whether early or later, but rather grew out of Royce's earliest writings. The first part will reconstruct the early pragmatism in the dissertation of 1878 and find that the kernal of a Roycean approach to semiotics was the idea of a mediating third . The second part will show how the disseration's pragmatism develops into a phenomenology of time that contains Royce's earliest semiosic insights. The third part will explain how the early pragmatism and phenomenology come together in the argument on the possibility of error from Royce's The Religious Aspect of Philosophy of 1885. The possibility of error is Royce's original argument for absolute idealism, so the essay will conclude that a Roycean approach to semiotics entails a semiotics of the absolute.
Journal Article
Royce is Here, Too? A Few Thoughts on Voparil's Reconstruction of Rorty's Engagement with Royce
In this essay, I respond to Chris Voparil's reconstruction of Richard Rorty's engagement with Josiah Royce's pragmatism in chapter 4 of Reconstructing Pragmatism. I first express my thoughts about Voparil's three main claims about Rorty's reconstruction of Royce's pragmatism. I then mention what I took to be the least interesting part of this chapter. Finally, I propose that Alain Locke's pragmatism, and more specifically his approach to resolving conflicting loyalties and his appropriation of Royce's concept of wise provincialism, could function as a bridge between Royce's absolute pragmatism and Rorty's pragmatism. Readers should take the last part of this essay as a prolegomenon to a study of Locke's appropriation of Royce's concept of wise provincialism.
Journal Article
Loyalty, Betrayal, and Atonement
In the mid-2000s, the number of United States military veterans committing suicide drastically increased. In an effort to understand the causes this crisis, renewed attention was given to “moral injury,” a type of trauma identified by psychologists in the 1990s. While initially confined to the field of psychiatry, interest in moral injury has spread, with spiritual care providers, legal experts, and military ethicists weighing in. Academic philosophers, meanwhile, have largely overlooked moral injury. In this essay, I seek to fill that lacuna. Drawing upon the ethical philosophy of Josiah Royce, I propose a philosophical scaffolding for psychopathological approaches to healing moral injury that addresses the limitations of current approaches.
Journal Article
Pragmatism’s Prophets of Community
The misconception that pragmatism is a philosophy of action often serves the cause of rampant individualism. Despite the fact that “vulgar” pragmatism is rarely treated in scholarly discussions, the ideas that it entails, such as that persons are isolated entities, that nominalism is a more viable doctrine than idealism or realism, and the utilitarian gospel of greed, still emerge in scholarly debates. If we think about what Charles S. Peirce and Josiah Royce considered fundamental to the pragmatic vision—the purport of ideas and the growth of meaning—such a misreading not only loses ground, but we are forced to reevaluate our engagement with the pragmatic tradition as a whole. For if meaning is always deferred towards an indefinite future to be developed by communal reasonableness, then the sanctity of the individual could be considered only in relation to a community. I argue that both Peirce and Royce are representatives of a prophetic tradition in philosophy that grounds the community as a fundamental problem of philosophy and that they may justifiably be called prophets of community. Prophetic pragmatism is here understood to be (1) a critique of culture, (2) a response to the time-bound experience of humanity, (3) an inventive philosophical practice, and (4) a religiously inspired moral project. Examining Peirce and Royce from this perspective allows us to redeem what is of “eternal” value in their work from the personal prejudices that plagued their thought. Moreover, this approach helps us realize the need for communities to be more open to self-and mutual-interpretation in the hope that we might “learn to understand one another.”
Journal Article
Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce's Ethico-Religious Insight
This book contends that Josiah Royce bequeathed to philosophy a novel idealism based on an ethico-religious insight. This insight became the basis for an idealistic personalism, wherein the Real is the personal and a metaphysics of community is the most appropriate approach to metaphysics for personal beings, especially in an often impersonal and technological intellectual climate. The first part of the book traces how Royce constructed his idealistic personalism in response to criticisms made by George Holmes Howison. That personalism is interpreted as an ethical and panentheistic one, somewhat akin to Charles Hartshorne's process philosophy. The second part investigates Royce's idealistic metaphysics in general and his ethico-religious insight in particular. In the course of these investigations, the author examines how Royce's ethico-religious insight could be strengthened by incorporating the philosophical theology of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Emmanuel Levinas's ethical metaphysics. The author concludes by briefly exploring the possibility that Royce's progressive racial anti-essentialism is, in fact, a form of cultural, antiblack racism and asks whether his cultural, antiblack racism taints his ethico-religious insight.
eBook
Time, will, and purpose : living ideas from the philosophy of Josiah Royce
Josiah Royce (1855-1916) has had a major influence on American intellectual life -- both popular movements and cutting-edge thought -- but his name often went unmentioned while his ideas marched forward. The leading American proponent of absolute idealism, Royce has come back into fashion in recent years. With several important new books appearing, the formation of a Josiah Royce Society, and the re-organization of the Royce papers at Harvard, the time is ripe for Time, Will, and Purpose. Randall Auxier delves into the primary texts written by Royce to retrieve the most poignant ideas, the ideas we need most in the present day, while he also offers a new framework for understanding the development of Royce's philosophy. Auxier responds to everything that has been written about Royce, both early and recent.
eBook
The Growing Edges of Beloved Community: From Royce to Thurman and King
Howard Thurman acknowledged a certain indebtedness to Josiah Royce, especially to his conception of the beloved community and philosophy of loyalty. Royce also exercised an influence, directly or indirectly, through Thurman and others, on the thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. The African American experience altered significantly if not decisively the socioethical trajectory of this trope – “the beloved community” – within the history of philosophy and theology in America. Beyond the “legal aspect of integration,” which involves changes in policies and regulations, Howard Thurman emphasized in 1966 a “second meaning of integration that has to do with the quality of human relations.” Although the genius of Thurman or King cannot be reduced to the ideas of their predecessors, whether Royce and Du Bois, whether intellectual or cultural, this essay demonstrates that something valuable is gained by revisiting the philosophical history as well as the pragmatic meaning of this trope from Royce to Thurman and King.
Journal Article