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This chapter begins with a description of the life of Josiah Royce. It then discusses the following themes from Royce: proof of the existence of God, ethical theory, and the problem of evil in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy; the panpsychism of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy; the four conceptions of being in The World and the Individual; time and eternity and the worlds of description and acquaintance mainly in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy; and the notion of the beloved community in The Philosophy of Loyalty and The Problem of Christianity. Some comments on Royce as a religious thinker and man are presented.

This chapter presents a brief history of the Royce–Howison debate in 1895 and reconstructs George Holmes Howison's critiques of Royce's mostly epistemic arguments for God's existence, as Royce articulated them in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. It argues that because Howison serves as Josiah Royce's philosophical foil during his “middle” period, Royce's idealism gradually becomes more similar to Howison's personal idealism. It also analyzes Royce's modified ontological argument for God's existence in his 1895 lecture “The Conception of God”. Additionally, it describes how Howison's criticism is a valid one, even though he misinterprets Royce's idealism and its argument for God's existence.

This chapter presents an essay on American classical philosopher Josiah Royce's philosophy of the community based on his book titled The World and the Individual. This book is based on Royce's Gifford lectures delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1899 and 1900. It states that the philosophic irony in the lectures would have triggered a challenge and strong criticism from Scottish philosopher David Hume. This chapter suggests that the lectures represent one of the ambitious philosophical attempts to ground the existence of the individual self within the context of an all-knowing Absolute Mind.

This chapter explores Josiah Royce's views on community and on William James's concept of religion. More specifically, it considers Royce's account of the “social depth structure of religion” as opposed to the celebration of progressive individualization in modern society. It explains how Royce resituates pragmatism by conceptualizing human understanding as a community-related type of knowledge that builds upon Peircian semiotics. It also examines Royce's rejection of the dyad “detached individual”/“collectivity” in his philosophy of religion, along with his development of the religious ideas contained in his pragmaticist philosophy in the light of—but in opposition to—the background of Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche's claims that God is nothing but our projection. The chapter concludes by assessing Royce's concept of community in relation to Charles Sanders Peirce's insight and to Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's conceptualization of the relation between the self and the other.

This chapter introduces the philosophy of loyalty by Josiah Royce in 1908 and uses the example of the sinking of the Lusitania to show the rejection of loyalty by Germany. Causes, in the end, came to be identified with communities by Royce. In his 1912 The Sources of Religious Insight and his 1913 The Problem of Christianity, loyalty is transformed from a commitment to a cause to “the practically devoted love of an individual for a community”. Here Royce summarizes three principles of loyalty. First, the communities to which individuals are loyal may be living beings whose reality is of a higher type. The second principle connects the meaning of the life which Royce calls the process of salvation. Finally, each person becomes part of the community of those loyal to loyalty. The result is at once unification and, by the actions of loyalty, individualization.

This chapter introduces Josiah Royce's ethico-religious insight and provides an outline of the topics of the book. It starts with an epigram that characterizes Royce's general philosophical temperament. It then claims that Royce's ethico-religious insight is at the center of his entire philosophy. Royce focuses his philosophical thought on a metaphysics of community, on a metaphysics as old as the Judeo-Christian tradition but as recent as the late nineteenth century. The chapter argues that Royce's philosophy is a philosophical testament to Pauline Christianity and its emphasis on the Body of Christ as a universal agapic community.

This chapter explores the double foundation of a pragmatist theory of religion in William James's empirical psychology and Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics. It argues that James's theory of religion cannot account for processes articulating religious experience because it lacks an appropriate concept of symbolic mediation between individual mental states and their intentional content. It thus connects James's theory of religion with Peircean semiotics and highlights the importance of the late works of Josiah Royce, including The Sources of Religious Insight and The Problem of Christianity, in this regard. The chapter considers Royce's concept of the invisible church in particular and goes on to compare James's strengths with Royce's philosophy of religion. It concludes by calling for a synthesis of American pragmatism and German historicism to proceed in a direction of a pragmatist theory of religion, which integrates “the semiotic theory of self and community with a nonteleological understanding of history.”

The foundation of the psychology of religion in the work of William James and others is a major methodological breakthrough in the empirical study of religion. This psychology of religion focuses on experience, offering an alternative to the emphasis on religious doctrines or institutions. This chapter first presents a reconstruction of William James’s relevant writings. It then compares them to the theological writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who is sometimes seen as a source of inspiration for James. Finally it demonstrates the epochal achievement of Josiah Royce’s combination of pragmatist semiotics and the psychology of religion.

Although Charles Peirce never secured an appointment at Harvard, in 1872 his friend William James did, and made the institution known for a peculiar variant of pragmatism. James gathered around him a talented group of colleagues, including the leading proponent of idealism, Josiah Royce, and together they made Harvard central to the study of metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. The institution would remain the leading place to study professional philosophy until late in the twentieth century.

This chapter focuses on Josiah Royce's discussions of American philosophy. It presents a letter addressed to G. Stanley Hall in February 1898, concerning the teaching of philosophy to philosophically minded students. This letter serves as evidence that the historical writings of Royce regarding American philosophy have not fared well in an age whose foci are plurality, diversity, and novelty.

In the new university system of the late nineteenth century, there was a consensus on idealism as the most effective response to the challenge of Charles Darwin. Nine older thinkers typified philosophy in the young American university: Borden Parker Bowne; J.E. Creighton, G.S. Fullerton, George Holmes Howison, George Ladd, G. S. Morris, Elisha Mulford, James Seth, and Jacob Gould Sherman. Two younger scholars, Josiah Royce and John Dewey, trained in the leading doctoral programme in the US at Johns Hopkins absorbed these conventional ideas.

In this chapter, Dwayne Tunstall contends that the idealist consensus in philosophy, as represented by Josiah Royce, that existed at the dawn of the twentieth century in the United States was never adequately refuted by the New Realists. Rather, the New Realists seemed to have persuaded enough professional philosophers that realism was a more fruitful approach for conducting philosophical inquiries than post-Kantian idealism. Accordingly, Tunstall characterizes the Royce–New Realist debate not as an overthrowing of an obsolescent philosophical view with a better one, but as a series of profound disagreements over the nature and purpose of philosophy.

Trevor Pearce examines Mead’s early intellectual development and shows in detail how difficult it was for a young Christian at the time to integrate Darwin into his worldview. Pearce explores the deep existential crisis that resulted from these difficulties. Based on new and newly reevaluated biographical material, Pearce traces the development of Mead’s views through his years in college, in a longer phase of existential reorientation, and as a student of philosophy and psychology. Pearce also shows how Mead’s education with Josiah Royce at Harvard and Wilhelm Dilthey in Berlin—both authors who saw the doctrine of evolution as a means to come to a better understanding of the human being’s “spiritual” nature—was key to resolving his early intellectual and personal problems and continued to form the center of his later work.

This chapter argues that Josiah Royce's concept of error can be a fruitful addition to contemporary accounts of feminist epistemology. In particular, it contends that Royce's concept of error can illuminate the problems that arise when multiple individuals who have different forms of epistemic privilege give conflicting accounts of an incident. Moreover, this chapter claims that Royce's account of communal inquiry provides us with a potential basis for developing error sensitivity within communities. In order to illustrate these claims, this chapter draws upon the work of Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, and other feminist theorists to highlight how epistemologically privileged accounts can come into conflict in addition examining how Royce's account of error develops through The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, The Problem of Christianity, and “Error and Truth.”

This chapter focuses on some of the neglected American philosophers in the history of symbolic interactionism, including Josiah Royce, George Herbert Mead, and Chauncey Wright. Historians of social psychology and sociology have given considerable attention to the development of symbolic interactionism, but they have overlooked the fact that at the turn of the century there was already a well-developed American philosophical tradition of social interactionism. While the roles played by James Mark Baldwin, William James, and John Dewey have been recognized and described in detail, the contribution of Royce, one of Mead's teachers, is seldom mentioned, and Charles Sanders Peirce's interactionism has been adequately treated only by philosophers. Wright's pioneering studies of self-consciousness appear to have been ignored altogether. This chapter makes a compelling case for giving proper recognition to these “neglected” philosophers.

This chapter presents an essay on the importance of Ralph Waldo Emerson for classical American philosophy. It explains that despite the differences and disagreements among several classic American philosophers including William James, Josiah Royce and John Dewey, they have one influence in common, and that is the thought of Emerson. Even George Santayana, another major figure of the American classical period, had an abiding interest in Emerson's thought and he frequently referred to Emerson in his own writings.