Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce (November 20, 1855 – September 14, 1916) was an American objective idealist philosopher.

Life

Royce, born in Grass Valley, California, grew up in pioneer California very soon after the California Gold Rush. He received the B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley (at that time located in Oakland) in 1875 where he also accepted an instructorship teaching English composition, literature, and rhetoric. After some time in Germany, where he came to admire Hermann Lotze, the new Johns Hopkins University awarded him in 1878 one of its first four doctorates, in philosophy. He taught a course on the history of German thought, which was “one of his chief interests” because he was able to give consideration to the philosophy of history (Pomeroy, 6). He then taught philosophy, first at the University of California, Berkeley, then at Harvard from 1882 until his death, thanks to the good offices of William James, who was at once Royce's friend and philosophical antagonist.

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 the American West, “As one of the four giants in American philosophy of his time […] Royce overshadowed himself as historian, in both reputation and output” (Pomeroy, 2). During his first three years at Harvard, Royce taught many different subjects such as English composition, forensics, psychology and philosophy for other professors. He finally received a position as a professor in 1892. During this time he suffered a breakdown and took a semester off during which he did most of his historical writing (Pomeroy, 3).

Grass Valley Library Royce Branch

Clendenning (1999) is the standard biography. Autobiographical remarks by Royce can be found at Oppenheim (2001). In 1883 he was approached by a publishing company who asked him to write the state history of California, “In view of his precarious circumstances at Harvard and his desire to pursue the philosophical work for which he had come east, Royce found the prospect attractive […]. He wrote to a friend that he was ‘tempted by the money’” (Pomeroy 3). Royce viewed the task as a side project, which he could use to fill his free time. Royce spent a significant period of time writing histories of California, enjoying it so much that he began to write novels set in California in which he was able to include his philosophical ideas. The books were considered to be “the fictional counterpart to his history, in which he developed similar philosophical themes” (Pomeroy, 5). In 1891 his historical writing career came to an end, but not before he had published several novels, reviews of California’s historical volumes, and articles in journals.

Ideas

Royce's key works include The World and the Individual (1899-1901) and The Problem of Christianity (1913), both based on lectures, given at the Gifford and Hibbert lectures series respectively. The heart of Royce's idealist philosophy was his contention that the apparently external world has real existence only as known by an ideal Knower, and that this Knower must be actual rather than merely hypothetical. He offered various arguments for this contention in both of his major works. He appears never to have repudiated this view, even though his later works are largely devoted to expositing his philosophy of community.

The inscription at the entrance to the library

Two key influences on the thought of Royce were Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. In fact, it can be argued that a major way Peirce's ideas entered the American academy is through Royce's teaching and writing, and eventually that of his students. Peirce also reviewed Royce's The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885). Some have claimed that Peirce also supervised Royce's Ph.D., but that is impossible as Peirce arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1879.

Royce is also perhaps the founder of the Harvard school of logic, Boolean algebra, and foundation of mathematics. His logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of mathematics were influenced by Charles Peirce and Albert Bray Kempe. Students who in turn learned logic at Royce's feet include Clarence Irving Lewis, who went on to pioneer modal logic, Edward Vermilye Huntington, the first to axiomatize Boolean algebra, and Henry M. Sheffer, known for his eponymous stroke. Much of Royce's writings on logic and mathematics, reminiscent in some ways of Bertrand Russell's much better known Principia Mathematica, and on scientific method, are reproduced in Royce (1951, 1961).

In recent decades, Royce appears not to have attracted as much attention as other now-classic American philosophers, such as Peirce, John Dewey, and his Harvard colleagues William James, and George Santayana. Philosophers influenced by Royce include Brand Blanshard in the United States and Timothy L.S. Sprigge in the United Kingdom.

Legacy

• The Royce School, which later merged with Anna Head's School for Girls to become the Head-Royce School
• Royce Hall, one of the original four buildings at UCLA
• Grass Valley Library-Royce Branch

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (November 2007)

• Primary
  • 1912. The Sources of Religious Insight. 2001 ed., Catholic Univ. of America Press. online edition
  • 1913. The Problem of Christianity. 2001 ed., Catholic Univ. of America Press. online edition (volume one)
  • 1914. War and Insurance. Macmillan.
  • 1916. The Hope of the Great Community. Macmillan.
  • 1919. Lectures on Modern Idealism. Ed. by J. Loewenberg. Yale University Press.
  • 1920. Fugitive Essays, ed. J. Loewenberg. Harvard University Press.
  • 1951. Royce's Logical Essays: Collected Logical Essays of Josiah Royce. Robinson, D.S., ed. Dubuque, IA: W. C. Brown Co.
  • 1961. Principles of Logic. Philosophical Library.
  • 1963. Josiah Royce's Seminar 1913-1914: As Recorded in the Notebooks of Harry T. Costello. Ed. by G. Smith. Rutgers University Press.
  • 2005 (1969). The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, 2 vols. Ed. by J. J. McDermott. Fordham University Press.
  • 1970. The Letters of Josiah Royce. Ed. by J. Clendenning. University of Chicago Press.
  • 1998. Metaphysics / Josiah Royce: His Philosophy 9 Course of 1915-1916. Hocking, W. E., R. Hocking, and F. Oppenheim, eds. State University of New York Press.
  • 2001. Josiah Royce's Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, 2 vols. Ed. by Oppenheim, F. Thoemmes Press. History of American Thought - Archive copy at the Internet Archive
  • 2002 California : a study of American character : from the conquest in 1846 to the second vigilance committee in San Francisco Berkeley : Heyday Books, c2002.

• Secondary
  • Auxier, R., ed., 2000. Critical Responses to Josiah Royce, 1885-1916, 3 vols. Thoemmes Press.
  • Clendenning, J., 1999. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, 2nd ed. Vanderbilt University Press.
  • Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.
  • Kuklick, Bruce, 1985. Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Biography. Hackett.
  • Clarence Irving Lewis, 1916, "Types of Order and the System [Sigma]," Philosophical Review 25: 407-19.
  • Pomeroy, Earl. "Josiah Royce, Historian in Quest of Community." The Pacific Historical Review 40 (1971): 1-20. JSTOR. IUPUI University Library, Indianapolis. 15 Apr. 2008
  • Oppenheim, F. M., 1980. Royce's Voyage Down Under: A Journey of the Mind. University Press of Kentucky.
  • -----, 1987. Royce's Mature Philosophy of Religion. University of Notre Dame Press.
  • -----, 1993. Royce's Mature Ethics. University of Notre Dame Press.
  • Trotter, G., 2001. On Royce. Wadsworth.

External links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Josiah Royce" -- by Kelly A. Parker.
• The World and the Individual online text (Macmillan Company, London 1900-1901), a summary and a biography.
• A collection of essays.
• Renaming ceremony, 2005, of the Grass Valley Library Royce Branch