27 Facts About Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce was an American Pragmatist and objective idealist philosopher and the founder of American idealism.

Josiah Royce is the only Classical American philosopher who studied and wrote history.

Josiah Royce stands out starkly in the philosophical crowd because he was the only major American philosopher who spent a significant period of his life studying and writing history, specifically of the American West.

Autobiographical remarks by Josiah Royce can be found in Oppenheim's study.

Josiah Royce viewed the task as a side project, which he could use to fill his free time.

All errors are judged to be erroneous in comparison to some total truth, Josiah Royce argued, and we must either hold ourselves infallible or accept that even our errors are evidence of a world of truth.

Josiah Royce's Absolute is the ground and originator of community, a personal, temporal being who preserves the past in its entirety, sustains the full present by an act of interpretation, and anticipates every possibility in the future, infusing these possibilities with value as the ideal of community.

Josiah Royce believed that human beings do have experience of the Absolute in the irrevocability of each and every deed we do.

The philosophical idea of the Absolute is an inevitable hypothesis for a coherent system of thought, Josiah Royce argued, but for practical purposes and a meaningful ethical life, all human beings need is an ongoing "will to interpret".

Josiah Royce never intended this result and responded to Howison's criticism first in a long supplementary essay to the debate, and then by developing the philosophy of the individual person in greater detail in his Gifford Lectures, published under the title The World and the Individual.

Simultaneously Josiah Royce was enduring a resolute assault on his hypothetical absolutism from James.

Realism, according to Josiah Royce, held that to be is to be independent, which mysticism and critical rationalism advanced other criteria, that to be way to, immediacy in the case of mysticism and objective validity in critical rationalism.

Hence, for Josiah Royce, it is a limitation of conceptual thought that obliges us to philosophize according to logic rather than integrating our psychological and appreciated experience into our philosophical doctrines.

Broadly speaking, Josiah Royce's is a virtue ethic in which our loyalty to increasingly less immediate ideals becomes the formative moral influence in our personal development.

Some recent scholarship on Josiah Royce has framed his philosophy of loyalty as being based on racist theories of assimilation and conquest.

Tommy J Curry argues that previous generations of Royce scholars have ignored the historical context and primary texts Josiah Royce used to develop his theories of racial contact.

Curry writes that Josiah Royce was widely read as both an imperialist and an anti-Black racist by his contemporaries.

Mecklin insisted that Josiah Royce's theories suggested that while white Anglos had a racial gift and duty to lead the world towards the ideal, the Negro had no special gift and as such could have their racial traits destroyed through assimilation.

The final phase of Josiah Royce's thought involved the application and further illustration of the concepts he had defended since 1881.

Some have seen here a fundamental shift in Josiah Royce's thinking but the evidence is far from conclusive.

Josiah Royce never was an old-style absolutist in either method or ontology but there were those among his peers who only came to recognize this in his later thought.

In seeking to show the reality of the invisible community, perhaps Josiah Royce was seeking communion with his departed son Christopher and his close friend William James, both of whom had died in 1910.

Josiah Royce kept these and other personal tragedies far from the text of his published work, but the grieving certainly affected and deepened his insight and perhaps exaggerated the quality of his hope.

Two key influences on the thought of Josiah Royce were Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.

Josiah Royce influenced the Harvard school of logic, Boolean algebra, and foundations of mathematics.

Josiah Royce saw the self as the product of a process of social interaction.

Josiah Royce considered that the social self could itself become diseased, seeing delusions of grandeur or persecution as distortions of everyday self-consciousness, with its concern for social standing and reflected place in the world.