Rorty and Royce

Despite the evident lack of pragmatist family resemblance between the “absolute pragmatism” of Josiah Royce and Rorty’s antifoundationalism, historicism, and contingentism, this chapter identifies a shared project of, in Rorty’s parlance, intervening in cultural politics. Three claims are advanced: first, that Royce’s later work can be productively viewed as a series of philosophical interventions in cultural politics; second, that while evidence of Rorty’s engagement with Royce’s thought is scant, drawing on archival material establishes that it exists and was more influential on Rorty than currently appreciated; and, third, that reading Rorty and Royce within the same frame generates insights about the transformative moral resources available to pragmatists—namely, the power of affective ties and ethical commitments exemplified in the notion of loyalty. What results is an approach to questions of justice through the lens of community particularly attuned to those who have been marginalized or excluded.

Semblanza absolutamente exacta: mapas y medios en Borges y Royce

Josiah Royce, the American idealist philosopher (1855-1916), is best known to readers of Borges in connection with a recursive map-within-a-map drawn upon the soil of England. Indeed, Borges ranks ​​"el mapa de Royce" side-by-side with his beloved Zeno´´´ s paradox in “Otro poema de los dones” (336), a Whitmanesque catalog of a few of his favorite things. Borges appreciated Royce as a fellow-wanderer through the late nineteenth-century thickets of both Anglo-American idealism and the new mathematics of transfinite numbers. Royce was not so much an influence on Borges as a fellow traveler who had arrived in a somewhat similar place after passing through Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Cantor. After cataloging connections between the two thinkers and explicating Royce's map, I will suggest that both figures are theorists of infinity and metaphysicians of the copy who offer fertile suggestions to our understanding of media in general and maps in particular. Though Royce and Borges both can strike some readers as architects of suffocating idealistic structures, there is a difference. Royce thinks his figures of infinity really do disclose the truth about the universe. Borges sees in such figures the paradoxes and slippages involved in any project of perfect duplication, and his skepticism about philosophical representation is designed, ultimately, to provide oxygen and exit from totalitarian systems. In this I would view Borges as a follower of Royce's close friend, Harvard colleague and philosophical antagonist: William James.

The Crisis of Community and the Promise of Provincialism

Basic consensus in any sort of discussion has become a precious rarity of late. Polarized opinions dominate what passes for a conversation and even the old media has lost their power to manufacture consent in the global digital cacophony. This could all be seen as signaling a return of the political. I think, however, that we are witnessing a crisis of community: we are not only less and less capable of talking to each other with understanding, but we are also unable to connect past, present, and future meaningfully. In this short essay I am examining a possible way out through the lens of a specific form of provincialism as envisioned by the American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855 – 1946). The account of Royce’s provincialism will be bracketed by a short examination of his understanding of the nature of community and a brief excursus to the problem of borders through semiotic lenses. This short essay serves merely as a preliminary attempt to approach the problems here discussed in future research for a possible tomorrow.

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

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.