The Religion of Absolute Pragmatism: Josiah Royce and Community’s Loyalty

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Martin Stünkel
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Pragmatic Interpretation ◽  
Josiah Royce ◽  
Point Of Departure

SummaryThe article examines Josiah Royce’s contribution to the debate on a modern concept of religion. It emerges in the discussion with William James’ thinking. Taking his point of departure from a pragmatic interpretation of the notion of the absolute, Royce describes the loyalty of communities as a manifestation of unity, promoting and defining individual creativity and variability. Manifesting man’s need for salvation ‘religion’ formally represents directedness towards an absolute aim that is expressed in a creative community of interpreters.

Josiah Royce — Twenty Years After

1936 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-224
Author(s):  
Julius Seelye Bixler
Keyword(s):  
Critical Power ◽  
William James ◽  
The Face ◽  
Realistic View ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Josiah Royce ◽  
Twentieth Anniversary ◽  
Immediate Experience

‘Two hundred years from now,’ exclaimed William James, in one of his characteristically enthusiastic moods, ‘Harvard will be known as the place where Josiah Royce once taught.’ The approach of the twentieth anniversary of Royce's death is an appropriate time at which to inquire whether the prophecy — making allowances for the exaggeration of James's friendly generosity — is in a fair way toward being fulfilled. Has Royce's work so far stood the test of time? Or must we say that as the experimental interest bequeathed by James increases the calm assurance of Royce's philosophy must decrease? And with the growing seriousness which practical issues assume have we time or inclination left for speculations about the Absolute? Has not the war destroyed our faith in the world's reasonableness and forced us to take a less indulgently ‘idealistic’ and more frankly ‘realistic’ view?Often we say this, but as often we are forced to remind ourselves that the ‘realism’ in which we take pride may have the virtue of looking the immediate facts squarely in the face, but may lack the sustained critical power which is eager to face other facts than those which are immediate. In that type of realism which is content to ‘take things as they come,’ there is a suggestion of an inability to see why they come as they do. As pluralists and empiricists, appealing to what we call ‘immediate experience’ for our data, we may say that our world is shot to pieces and that it cannot be put together again. But as philosophers and religious men we cannot leave the matter here and believe that we have seen through our problem or seen our job through.

scholarly journals THE TURN OF THE SCREW: HENRY JAMES AS AN AUTHOR AND A CRITIC

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-67
Author(s):  
M.B. Rarenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
William James ◽  
Absolute Truth ◽  
The Core ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
New Type ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
The Absolute

The article considers the story by Henry James (1843 – 1916) «The Turn of the Screw» (1898 – first edition, 1908 – second edition) in connection with the emergence of a new type of narrator in the writer's late prose. The worldview and creative method of H. James are formed under the influence of the philosophy of pragmatism, which became widespread at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries thanks to the works of the writer's elder brother, the philosopher William James (1842 – 1910). The core of pragmatism is the pluralistic concept of William James based on the assumption that knowledge can be realized from very limited, incomplete, and inadequate «points of view» and this leads to the statement that the absolute truth is essentially unknowable. The epistemological statements of William James's theory is that the content of knowledge is entirely determined by the installation of consciousness, and the content of the truth in this case depends on the goals and experience of the human, i.e. the central starting point is the consciousness of the person. Henry James not only creates works of art, but also sets out in detail the principles of his work both on the pages of fiction works of small and large prose, putting them in the mouths of their characters – representatives of the world of art, and in the prefaces to his works of fiction, as well as in critical works.

Tennant's Struggle with a “Desperate Task”

1942 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 199-208
Author(s):  
Graham Frisbee
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Do So

In his essay, “On God and the Absolute,” F. H. Bradley declares that the “assertor of an imperfect God is, whether he knows it or not, face to face with a desperate task or a forlorn alternative. He must try to show (how I cannot tell) that the entire rest of the Universe, outside his limited God, is known to be still weaker and more limited. Or he must appeal to us to follow our Leader blindly and, for all we know, to a common and overwhelming defeat.” The appeal of the second course, even when it is set forth in the spirited and heroic manner of William James, cannot survive a full realization of what is involved in such a prospect. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that most of the more sober-minded theologians who hold the idea of a limited God attempt to do so in the first form suggested by Bradley. F. R. Tennant belongs to this group. And it is his attempt to accomplish the “desperate task” that we propose to examine.

Movement in Repose

Qui Parle ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-49
Author(s):  
Aaron Frederick Eldridge
Keyword(s):  
Modern Concept ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Philosophical Ethic ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Point Of Departure

Abstract How does tradition, a transmission of body and language, disclose a form of life? This article takes as its point of departure Talal Asad’s methodological pivot away from the modern concept of “belief” to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “form of life.” It elaborates the philosophical and anthropological implications of a rigorous notion of form of life through Asad’s concept of tradition and Martin Heidegger’s rereading of Aristotle’s physis. Interrupting this theoretical argument, a scene from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with Orthodox Christian ascetics in Lebanon exemplifies the challenge (and insistence) of form of life. The article then turns to consider a powerful reading of form of life grounded in Baruch Spinoza’s theory of emanation and vitalist univocity. While echoing the concerns of this article, Spinoza’s philosophical ethic defers the central question posed by “form of life” by making the latter a world-producing apparatus. That approach to form of life foregrounds the possibility of being other than what one is, rather than the crucial question of “still experience” and its dynamic repose. The article concludes by reading this still experience alongside C. Nadia Seremetakis’s work in Greece, which details the work of stillness and memory, the deathly pain of history, as sites where the cultivation of noncontemporaneous forms of life are brought into relief.

Josiah Royce's Philosophy of the Community: Danger of the Detached Individual

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
John J. McDermott
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
William James ◽  
Royal Institute ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Religion And Psychology ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Josiah Royce ◽  
The Individual

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.

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930)

1980 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurel Furumoto
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Paired Associate ◽  
American Psychological Association ◽  
Self Psychology ◽  
The Self ◽  
American Psychological ◽  
Mental Abilities ◽  
Josiah Royce ◽  
Work Done

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) was fourteenth President of the American Psychological Association, invented the paired-associate technique, founded an early psychological laboratory, and developed a system of self-psychology. Her eminence as a psychologist and a scholar was widely acknowledged and she was the recipient of two honorary degrees. Calkins published prolifically in both psychology and philosophy, moving away from psychology into philosophy during the latter half of her career. Both her work in psychology and philosophy came to center on the importance of the self. Calkins studied with William James, Josiah Royce and Hugo Münsterberg at Harvard in the 1890s, and although she completed all the requirements for the Ph.D., she was not granted the degree because she was a woman. In 1902, she was offered a Radcliffe degree which she declined on principle, because she believed that work done at Harvard should be recognized by a Harvard degree regardless of whether the recipient was a female or a male. On many occasions throughout her life, she expressed her opposition to differentiation between the sexes based on the assumption of inherent differences in mental abilities.

scholarly journals Transformationen der Kantischen Postulatenlehre im „Cambridge Pragmatism“ (Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce)

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-75
Author(s):  
Ludwig Nagl
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
The Will ◽  
Josiah Royce ◽  
Modern Experience

The “Cambridge pragmatists”, Charles S. Peirce, William James and Josiah Royce, are at least in two respects significantly indebted to Kant: first, as von Kempski, Apel and Murphey have shown, with regard to the epistemological issues investigated in pragmatism; secondly, with regard to the various pragmatic approaches to religion, something which has been long overlooked. These approaches are best understood as innovative re-readings of Kant’s postulates of freedom, immortality, and God. Since Hilary Putnam pointed out — in his 1992 book Renewing Philosophy — that James’s essay, “The Will to Believe”, in spite of having received a great deal of hostile criticism, is in “its logic, in fact, precise and impeccable”, James’s thoughts are considered by many contemporary philosophers (by Charles Taylor, e.g., and by Hans Joas) as particularly inspiring. James’s approach is based on the modern experience of secularism and interprets Kant’s “postulate” as the “option” to believe. A deepening of the debate on the relevance of Kant’s analysis of the horizon of religious hope with regard to human praxis for a pragmatism-inspired philosophy of religion can be expected from a detailed discussion of the thoughts of Peirce and Royce, of thoughts, which, in complex ways, relate to, as well as criticise, James’s individuum-focused interpretation of religious faith.

William James and the Philosophy of Life

2005 ◽  
pp. 205-222
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Present Discussion ◽  
Philosophy Of Life ◽  
National Life ◽  
Josiah Royce

This chapter presents some comments about the significance of William James's philosophy. James was a friend of Josiah Royce from his youth to the end of James's beneficent life. As a pupil of James for a brief time, Royce thought of himself as James's disciple; although perhaps a very bad one. According to Royce, James is an American philosopher of classic rank because he stands for a stage in our national self-consciousness—for a stage with which historians of our national mind must always reckon. This statement shall be the focus of the present discussion, which also estimates the significance of the stage in question, and of James's thought insofar as it seems to express the ideas and ideals characteristic of this phase of national life.

Josiah Royce's Philosophy of the Community: Danger of the Detached Individual

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
John J. McDermott
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
William James ◽  
Royal Institute ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Religion And Psychology ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Josiah Royce ◽  
The Individual

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.

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