The Relevance of Royce

By Kelly A. Parker and Jason Bell

This collection represents the rediscovery of Josiah Royce’s rich legacy that has occurred over the past decade.

The first part presents a series of historical explorations. The second takes up practical extensions of Royce’s work, bringing his ideas and methods to bear on contemporary philosophical matters. Among the topics addressed are the paradoxes of individualism; loyalty, democracy, and community; Royce’s efforts to respond to historical American racism; his contributions to engaged inter-faith religious discourse; the promise of his theory of error for a feminist account of knowledge; and his ethics of loyalty as a component in medical ethics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Feb 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823255290

Book preview

THE RELEVANCE OF ROYCE

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

THE RELEVANCE OF ROYCE

Edited by

KELLY A. PARKER

JASON BELL

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS    NEW YORK    2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

The editors gratefully acknowledge financial support for this project provided by Grand Valley State University, Mount Alison University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The relevance of Royce / edited by Kelly A. Parker and Jason Bell. — First edition.

     pages cm. — (American philosophy)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-8232-5528-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

   1. Royce, Josiah, 1855–1916. I. Parker, Kelly A., 1963– editor of compilation.

   B945.R64R45 2014

   191—dc23

2013028756

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14    5 4 3 2 1

First edition

Contents

      Introduction: The Continuing Relevance of Josiah Royce

Kelly A. Parker and Jason Bell

PART I. HISTORICAL EXPLORATIONS

  1  Josiah Royce: Alive and Well

John J. McDermott

  2  A Report on the Recent Dig into Royce’s MSS in the Harvard Archives

Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., Dawn Aberg, and John J. Kaag

  3  Goodbye, Idealist Consensus; Hello, New Realism!

Dwayne Tunstall

  4  On Four Originators of Transatlantic Phenomenology: Josiah Royce, Edmund Husserl, William Hocking, Winthrop Bell

Jason Bell

  5  Loyalty, Friendship, and Truth: The Influence of Aristotle on the Philosophy of Josiah Royce

Mathew A. Foust and Melissa Shew

  6  Complex Negation, Necessity, and Logical Magic

Randall E. Auxier

  7  Race, Culture, and Pluralism: Royce’s Logical Primitives

Scott L. Pratt

PART II. PRACTICAL EXTENSIONS

  8  Individuals Ain’t Ones: Who We Are in Royce’s World

Douglas R. Anderson

  9  Racism, Race, and Josiah Royce: Exactly What Shall We Say?

Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley

10  Enlightened Provincialism, Open-Ended Communities, and Loyalty-Loving Individuals: Royce’s Progressive Prescription for Democratic Cultural Transformation

Judith M. Green

11  Josiah Royce and the Redemption of American Individualism

Richard P. Mullin

12  Royce’s Relevance for Intrafaith Dialogue

Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J.

13  Necessary Error: Josiah Royce, Communities of Interpretation, and Feminist Epistemology

Kara Barnette

14  Communities in Pursuit of Community

Mary B. Mahowald

Notes

References

List of Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION

The Continuing Relevance of Josiah Royce

Kelly A. Parker and Jason Bell

In his own day, at Harvard University at the turn of the twentieth century, Josiah Royce was one of America’s premier philosophical exports, as well as a prominent interpreter of European and Asian thought to a domestic audience. Royce and his colleague William James were probably the two most prominent figures in American philosophy. Indeed, the arguments between Royce and James were played out for an international audience in numerous lectures, publications, and classrooms (the dialogue is evident, for example, in their respective Gifford Lectures, delivered between 1898 and 1902).¹ But after Royce’s death, and after two world wars, the topics dear to him—loyalty, idealism, and systematic metaphysics among them—faded from mainstream philosophical discussion. Part of the reason for this eclipse is that Royce baptized no disciples, preferring instead to engage his students and readers in the provocations of dialectical exchange. Then, too, the vagaries of history and intellectual fashion intervened. Just as the new realist challenges to his core positions were gaining ascendancy Royce passed away, at age sixty-one, without having offered a proper published response.² His closest philosophical colleagues, James and C. S. Peirce, had preceded him in death; John Dewey, whose inclinations were decidedly non-Roycean, became the public face of pragmatism and American philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. And of course pragmatism itself was soon eclipsed by other approaches. The new schools of logic and linguistic analysis imported from Europe as analytic philosophy dominated American philosophy in later decades; phenomenology, existentialism, and their postmodern successors occupied generations of European scholars. Royce’s vigorous but sympathetic critiques of pragmatism; his efforts to develop pragmatist-inspired tools of logic and linguistic analysis; his soaring explorations of such themes as loyalty, sorrow, and the modern significance of Christian faith; and his forays into what would later be recognized as applied ethics all came to be regarded as obsolete. Thanks, however, to the work and dedication of a small number of scholars—among whom we must mention John E. Smith, John J. McDermott, Frank M. Oppenheim, John Clendenning, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, Mary B. Mahowald, and Bruce Kuklick—Roycean themes never completely disappeared from the philosophical landscape.

Now, a hundred years after Royce’s heyday, we witness an upwelling of articles, books, and conferences dedicated to exploring the meaning of his thought. The recent rediscovery of the most prominent American proponent of idealism may signal a rebirth of idealism in American philosophy. Perhaps it signals that contemporary American philosophy has reached a mass sufficient to support a more thorough exploration of its heritage. Or it may be part of a movement back to the future, what Robert Cummings Neville has called a search for the highroad around modernism,³ a return to philosophical sources that were abandoned by the analytic and continental philosophical traditions alike. Whatever the reason, it is clear that a reexamination of this complex philosopher is under way.

The present volume is a collection of perspectives from contemporary philosophers engaged in exploring Royce’s work with a fresh eye. The reader will quickly see that while common themes emerge in the chapters of this volume, there is no unified party line of thought animating the current Roycean revival. Several contributors focus on Royce’s ethics as his chief contribution to philosophy. Others address his importance for race theory, highlighting the conflict that has arisen in interpreting the significance of his various writings and utterances regarding race. Some point to Royce’s overcoming of Absolute Idealism as his most important achievement, whereas others say the Absolute is the key to understanding Royce’s pragmatic metaphysics and ethics—but still others deny that Royce is much of a pragmatist at all. One identifies his previously unrecognized importance as an earlier practitioner and influential figure for phenomenology. Finally, two authors point to Royce’s logical innovations as the reason for his relevance.

Of course we do not intend this volume as a study in mere disagreement; it is also a study of the higher agreements that are possible when scholarly perspectives, questions, and disciplines peacefully meet in the spirit of honest inquiry. An important reason for Royce’s recent reemergence—his commitment to the potential of interdisciplinary work in academia—is visible in the broad disciplinary scope that this volume provides.

Those who seek virtuous historical exemplars of interdisciplinary philosophical work can learn much from Royce’s teaching and writings. Royce himself was an interdisciplinary maestro. His undergraduate degree was in the classics, and he maintained a lifelong interest in languages and literature (including the study of Sanskrit). He was elected president of both the American Philosophical Association and the American Psychological Association; he was an instructor in English at the University of California before he was a professor of philosophy at Harvard; his work on the history of California is regularly cited by contemporary American historians; he published a historical novel set in California; he was invited to give lectures on scientific method by prominent scientific societies; and at his logic seminars at Harvard, Royce enlisted the aid of colleagues from many disciplines, especially the sciences. As his guests they could come to its meetings to read their newest papers and to debate with one another and with him the philosophical principles of their work. Like him, they were seeking terms of unity.⁴

His purpose in these famous seminars was to see whether and what the methodological connections were between geology and chemistry, physics and astronomy, psychology and philosophy. Royce’s interdisciplinary approach in this project was no mere ornament; it was absolutely central to his beliefs about the ideal of inquiry itself, and to his arguments about the contributions that academic philosophers could make to the furtherance of interdisciplinary inquiry. For Royce, the philosopher in the modern academy had what he termed a business ethic, a duty of interdisciplinary labor in the corporation of the academy. Writes Royce, Philosophy itself, in so far as it is a legitimate calling at all, may in fact be compared to a sort of Cook’s [travel] bureau. Its servants are taught to speak various languages—all of them ill—and to know little of the inner life of the numerous foreign lands to which they guide the feet, or check the luggage of their fellow men.⁵ For Royce as for Socrates, the persistent posture of the questioning student is the philosopher’s specialization, allowing one to identify common problems and solutions across specialized boundaries.

In Royce’s 1902 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, he observed that one consequence of increasingly precise specializations within science, as within the twentieth-century academic system, was that researchers were less able to understand one another’s questions and methods—not just between sciences, but even within individual disciplines such as psychology. Here is a force that hinders interdisciplinary inquiry. To help unify the purpose of inquiry itself, Royce called for a new science, the comparative morphology of concepts that would occupy a borderland position, so as to offer large ranges of what one may call neutral ground, where philosopher and psychologist, special student and general inquirer, historian and sociologist, may seek each his own, while a certain truce of God may reign there regarding those boundary feuds which these various types of students are prone to keep alive, whenever they discuss with one another the limits of their various territories, and the relative importance of their different tasks.⁶

For Royce, this meant that neither the logical nor the empirical were reducible to the other, but the common test of organic improvement meant that advances could be begun or felt on either side: As a fact, I cordially accept, for myself, the view that the central problems of the logician and of the psychologist are quite distinct, and that the logician is not responsible for, or logically dependent upon a psychological theory of the thinking process. Yet I am unable to doubt that every advance upon one of these two sides of the study of the intellectual life makes possible, under the new conditions to which all our human progress is naturally subject, a new advance upon the other side.⁷

The justification for the comparative morphology of concepts is a pragmatic test of predictive success:

[T]his effort to justify scientific theories solely by their success in producing conceptual constructions that correspond in definite and controllable fashion with the phenomena, leads to a sort of practical theory of the business of thinking which closely relates the point of view of the logician to that of the psychologist. For the latter must view the thinking process as one of adjustment to the environment; and he must suppose the mental motives which determine the choice of one rather than another way of thinking to be in the long run determined, as to their natural history, by the success of one method of adjustment as compared to another.⁸

Such interdisciplinary and evolutionary success helps show that the categories of thought are indeed plastic (Royce, like other postmodern thinkers, forsakes a Kantian rigidity of categories) and that leading ideals and theories do decay and die,⁹ but the test of improvement in relation to the environment¹⁰ remains the ultimate organic test of our ideas.

For Royce, the fecundity of interdisciplinary criticism revealed that knowledge is not merely a matter of percept and/or concept—that is, of old-fashioned epistemologies attached to preevolutionary versions of realism and idealism—but also of a third activity; namely, the comparison of ideas between specialized modes of inquiry:

All such processes of comparison are equally characteristic of the cognitive activity which goes on during our explicitly and literally social life and of the cognitive activity which is needed when we think about our relations to our own individual past and future. In brief, neither the individual Ego nor the Alter of the literal social life, neither past nor future time can be known to us through a cognitive process which may be defined exclusively in terms of perception, of conception, and of the ideal leadings of the pragmatists. The self, the neighbour, the past, the future, and the temporal order in general become known to us through a third kind of cognition which consists of a comparison of ideas—a process wherein some self, or quasi-self, or idea interprets another idea, by means of a comparison which, in general, has reference to, and is more or less explicitly addressed to, some third self or idea.¹¹

Science, knowledge, and understanding are the product of comparison and interpretation by a community of investigators. While each inquirer may possess different disciplinary expertise, they all share a commitment to open inquiry guided by logic. This shared language is the province of philosophy.

So, for Royce, any data are relevant to philosophy in its role of critically comparing ideas and consequences; and each discipline conducts its own affairs, so long as it always loves the truth more than it fearfully guards its own disciplinary borders, beyond which other researchers cannot cross, and beyond which it cannot cross. This means that philosophy is not dependent on psychology for its worldview; nor is philosophy the king or queen of the academic disciplines. It is the servant and mediator of all, seeking to bring to light the capacity of inquiry to improve human life. It is thus a servant and mediator of inquiry itself, lifting it above the darkening stultification of jealously guarded disciplinary walls.

The chapters of this volume are intended to be an interdisciplinary resource for scholars interested in tracing both the historical importance and the contemporary relevance of Josiah Royce’s thought, in terms of its theoretical underpinnings, its historical context, and its practical applications. Scholarship undertaken from the perspectives of various disciplines is here included, so that this book will be of service to philosophy, religion and theology, history, politics, educational psychology, and medical ethics.

In Part I of the book, Historical Explorations, seven authors address Royce’s historical place in philosophy. These pieces collectively serve as the chronicle of an important period in the history of American philosophy, when realism and idealism mingled in the creation of American pragmatism. They also trace out the importance of these debates to the broader tradition of philosophy, both in Royce’s time and in ours.

In the opening chapter, John J. McDermott makes the case for Royce as a voice to which contemporary philosophers must attend. While our knowledge of any historical figure’s life and thought is inevitably sketchy and infused with our own concerns, in this Presidential Address to the Josiah Royce Society, McDermott demonstrates how Royce’s concerns do indeed dovetail with our own. Royce is an exemplar of what is now a rare kind of professional philosopher: one whose systematic explorations and critiques are simultaneously directed toward developing public and personal wisdom. McDermott quotes Royce’s observation, born of his own experience of tragedy, that Grief is our greatest opportunity for creation. The message from Royce is that out of the hard circumstances of fate and suffering, we may find the resources to build stronger, more connected selves and communities. The caution is that there is nothing inevitable about such a response—if we are to improve things, pedagogy is necessary. McDermott presents us Josiah Royce, assuredly Alive and Well, and an assuredly relevant philosopher for our day.

From July 2008 to September 2009, a team of three scholars scoured the Royce papers in the Harvard University Archives in a project affectionately known as the Dig (this name was a nod to a major tunnel-building project, the Big Dig, which was under way at the time in nearby Boston). In Chapter 2, Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., Dawn Aberg, and John J. Kaag report on their completion of the Dig, the goal of which was realized with online, open-access publication of the 800-page Comprehensive Index of the Josiah Royce Papers in the Harvard University Archives. This Comprehensive Index, along with the separate, more general Finding Aid recently prepared by the Harvard Archives staff, represents an important first step toward the eventual publication of a critical edition of Royce’s writings. Oppenheim, Aberg, and Kaag convey the circumstances and support that made this ambitious project possible; they describe their methods for managing the work flow and information their search generated; they report on an initial nineteen exciting discoveries within the Royce papers; finally, they describe the content and organization of the Comprehensive Index itself. Their account of the Dig will assist future editors and users of the Comprehensive Index and of the Harvard Archives Finding Aid; their report of initial discoveries will inspire the entire community of Royce scholars to make use of these important new research tools.

In Chapter 3, Dwayne Tunstall presents Royce in his own milieu, arguing against the view that Royce’s idealism was essentially defenseless against the assault of the New Realists, led by his Harvard colleague Ralph Barton Perry. Tunstall advances Royce’s argument that knowledge is creative and telic, and logically comprehensible as such, far from being a passive witnessing of a ready-made world. Tunstall reconstructs Royce’s response to the New Realists’ most serious criticism, that of the ego-centric predicament, based on arguments Royce presented in his 1915–16 Philosophy 9 course. This reconstructed argument, which highlights fundamental metaphysical issues, is in Tunstall’s view quite relevant to the realist-antirealist debates of our own time.

Jason Bell presents a view of a significant new dimension to our understanding of the early twentieth-century origins of phenomenology in Chapter 4. While there have been a number of studies that explore the thematic and historical connections between classical American philosophy and European phenomenology, Bell identifies the Canadian philosopher Winthrop Bell not only as a significant phenomenologist himself but also as the crucial mediating interpreter between Edmund Husserl and the Americans Josiah Royce and William Hocking. With this historical connection in mind we can begin to appreciate the fruitfulness of viewing Royce’s works as genuinely phenomenological writings (as Royce himself sometimes characterized them). Royce was an excellent student of the history of philosophy; among his most familiar influences was German idealism. Mathew A. Foust and Melissa Shew explore the direct influence of ancient Greek thought on Royce’s works in Chapter 5, focusing in particular on Aristotle’s legacy. They identify three distinct areas of Aristotelian influence on Royce: his views on truth and reality, his philosophy of loyalty, and his philosophy of community. Aristotle’s influence can be explicitly seen in all three of these areas: the first reflecting Royce’s adaptation of Aristotle’s realism, the second and third reflecting his embrace of Aristotle’s theory of friendship and his account of social life.

The last two chapters in Part I present studies of Royce’s logic. These chapters, by Randall E. Auxier and Scott L. Pratt, represent explorations of what is at this point the least well-understood area of Royce’s philosophical work. Royce’s first published book was the Primer of Logical Analysis for the Use of Composition Students, which he had written for his students in California in 1881. For the first volume of The World and the Individual, he wrote a long Supplementary Essay that addressed the more technical logic and mathematics behind the metaphysics of his 1899Gifford Lectures. Thereafter, and largely under C. S. Peirce’s influence, Royce continued to develop his understanding of logic in creative and sophisticated directions. While Royce did publish several encyclopedia articles on logical concepts, as well as a long systematic essay on The Principles of Logic,¹² his unpublished papers include thousands of pages of additional work on logic.

In Complex Negation, Necessity, and Logical Magic, Randall E. Auxier explains the way that Royce used alternative concepts of logical negation to frame his metaphysical inquiries. Prior to the innovations of Frege and Russell, logic afforded no fewer than seven forms of negation. While their revolutionary simplification made negation much easier to manage in a formal system, Auxier argues that it came at the loss of considerable subtlety in thought. Moreover, a proper understanding of Royce’s work requires us to understand how he used these richer predecessor conceptions of negation to make his case for the Absolute.

The notion that our logical system shapes and determines available ways to think about problems is carried further by Scott L. Pratt in Chapter 7. Pratt proposes a Roycean logic as an alternative to the dualistic logic of oppression that underlies colonialist and racist thought. He argues that we need a nuanced logical system that can simultaneously accommodate pluralism and differences among people, but can do so without ossifying such differences into the fixed categories and hierarchies of a rigid logic. In Royce’s work on the logic of taboos, and in his more general view of logic as the general science of purposive action, Pratt finds a promising framework for postcolonial thought. This pioneering work suggests that for Royce (as for Hegel, though their logical systems are very different indeed), logic functions not merely as a technical tool for scientists and mathematicians, but is indeed a fundamental stratum of social life.

Part II of the book, Practical Extensions, focuses on practical applications of Royce’s theories. Royce was deeply concerned with the practical relevance of philosophical theories. Two examples of Royce’s many forays into the arena of public debate were his correspondence with business leaders on questions of ethics related to the insurance industry, and his public advocacy of American intervention in the Great War against Germany’s military aggression against Belgium and neutral ships at sea. This volume relates Royce’s work to practical social problems, in terms of applied psychology (Douglas R. Anderson writes on Royce’s theory of the self, particularly as it applies to education); social and political ethics (with essays by Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley on race theory, Judith M. Green on democracy in the United States after 9/11, and Richard P. Mullin on the rethinking of American individualism in light of Royce’s account of loyalty); religion and theology (Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., describes Royce’s efforts at rapprochement between the Christian Church and other religious traditions); and problems of knowledge and practice (Kara Barnette’s chapter brings Royce’s thought into the context of feminist epistemology concerning the place of error in practical attempts to find the truth, and Mary B. Mahowald advances Royce’s philosophy of community in contrast with contemporary communitarianism, in regard to the question of prenatal testing for disability).

An introductory chapter by Douglas R. Anderson opens this section. Anderson discusses Royce’s metaphysical understanding of the origins of individuality through creative labor, in light of its possibility to improve popular culture. Writes Anderson, Our individuality is what we aim to achieve; it is not a simple ontological trait with which we are born…. To become individuals we must learn to express our own meaning; we cannot be reducible to antecedent causes. This, for Anderson, is a thesis with practical application, as for instance in terms of pedagogy, where a Roycean conception holds that individuals can be educated as unique and creative contributors to culture rather than as mere component objects of it: Despite much lip service to treating students as individuals or persons, the majority of texts for teaching teachers still employ a baseline behaviorism that treats students as effects to be caused or as objects to be manipulated. The take of the Roycean teacher would be quite otherwise. One would need to find ways to elicit and enable self-expression.

In Chapter 9, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley engages anew the ongoing debate over Royce’s 1905essay Race Questions and Prejudices. A variety of interpretations of Royce’s own views on race, as disclosed in the essay and in other of his writings, have been previously offered by Tommy J. Curry, Dwayne Tunstall, Marilyn Fischer, and Kegley herself. Here Kegley surveys the controversy, discusses some of the more problematic aspects of understanding historical discourse concerning race, and responds to Fischer and Curry’s charges that Royce’s writings reveal white supremacist and colonialist sympathies. Kegley notes in her conclusion that there is yet more work to do on the issue of Royce and race, and on concrete measures to address racial justice in our own time. Her chapter provides an important framework for moving both of these projects forward.

Judith M. Green’s focus is on dangerous antipathies within the American body politic. In recent years, the United States has been dominated by what Royce called a dangerous ‘mob spirit,’ arising from deep feelings about September 11 as these have been stirred up and directed by some of our political leaders and our mass media, leading to unquestioning majority support for a pre-emptive war in Iraq instead of a clearer, wiser thinking about how to transform the root causes of these dreadful events. Green writes that Royce’s three-part progressive prescription of enlightened provincialism, open-ended community, and loyalty-loving individuals cures the disease of xenophobic clannishness and turns the healthy body politic toward a higher provincialism. For Green, the healing of the divided United States will require that justice-minded Catholics and justice-minded Baptists (and justice-minded Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Native American traditionalists) reach out to each other, while bravely challenging those within their own communities who betray their founding spirit by rejecting a wider ‘loyalty to loyalty’ while insisting on a narrow, hierarchical orthodoxy within their communal interpretative process.

Many social and political theorists have identified American individualism as a problematic construct; feminist and communitarian thinkers alike have called for an alternative view of the self-in-community that more accurately reflects the facts of the socially and historically embedded life. In Chapter 11, Josiah Royce and the Redemption of American Individualism, Richard Mullin develops a nonatomistic view of the human person based on Royce’s conception of loyalty. Mullin focuses on Royce’s explicitly Christian notion of a Doctrine of Life as the organizing idea for the highest form of loyalty, and he asks whether this powerful ideal should or could be embraced by those outside the Christian faith. Mullin’s essay addresses the question—so pressing in a pluralistic, global world—of whether all people can legitimately regard themselves as members of the Roycean Great Community or if it is an inherently limited vision.

Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., explores the potential for Royce’s writings and efforts to serve as interreligious bridges between Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and other religious traditions. For Royce, "A comparative and scientific study of the social influences of the great religions is not needed to make us think well of Christianity, or of our own civilization, but will help us most, if it helps us at all, by assuming as far as possible, a highly judicial, an impartially appreciative attitude, and by telling not so much who has done best, but what each civilization in question has done to meet its own problems. Royce’s specific efforts in the comparative criticism of religious practices incorporate the psychological fact of temporally narrow consciousness, and show how by habit, memory, and abstraction we strive to indirectly enlarge the narrowness of our human span of consciousness. The judgments we subsequently make appeal unavoidably to a higher kind or kinds of consciousness in order to make the truth or error of those judgments possible and also actual."

In Chapter 13, Kara Barnette continues the project of Part II by interrogating, extending, and applying a central Roycean theme in the context of contemporary philosophy. Barnette explores the role of error in Royce’s philosophy and shows how emphasis on its positive aspect can help inform contemporary feminist epistemology (in particular, the feminist standpoint theory developed by Sandra Harding). Barnette illustrates the practical implications of taking error seriously through a consideration of a class of legal investigations and inquiries—interracial acquaintance rape—that involve particularly difficult differences in standpoint. The enhanced error sensitivity allowed by a Roycean account of inquiry promises to enhance our search for truth in a variety of situations.

The final chapter in this volume, by Mary B. Mahowald, shows Royce’s relevance in contemporary medical ethics, the paradigm field of applied ethics, or practical philosophy. Mahowald describes the cooperative practicality of Royce’s idealistic pragmatism and of Peirce’s community of inquiry as being better exemplified in the care of patients than in many philosophy departments. Unlike health care workers, professors often seem to ply their trade individualistically, as if each was separately capable of achieving optimal intellectual results. But just as individuals isolated from communities fail to make a difference, so too a community undifferentiated by individual communities fails to make a positive difference. Mahowald uses Royce’s notion of loyalty to loyalty to critique communitarianism, since communitarians tend to ignore the fact that people simultaneously belong to diverse communities whose interests and priorities are occasionally at odds. Identifying or defending the moral values of particular communities affords little help in resolving these conflicts for individuals who belong, as we all do, to multiple communities. For Mahowald, the principal of respect for individual loyalties, when they come into conflict (as she discusses in regard to the issue of prenatal testing for disabilities), means that The ideal of Community … is best approximated through a strategy by which the participation of communities commonly excluded from participation is maximized.

As should be evident, Josiah Royce’s work is a veritable treasure trove for contemporary philosophers, logicians, theologians, psychologists, historians, social scientists, educators, and students of the methodology of inquiry. The essays presented here provide a starting point for those who wish to better understand this central figure of the American philosophical tradition. We hope it also offers a starting point for further investigation into the areas that Royce himself considered centrally important for understanding and improving life in the modern world.

PART ONE

HISTORICAL EXPLORATIONS

ONE

JOSIAH ROYCE: ALIVE AND WELL

Presidential Address delivered to the Josiah Royce Society in honor of the 150th anniversary of Royce’s birth, 2005

John J. McDermott

Our form of consciousness is one of our chief human sorrows.

—Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight

I

Iam pleased to be here as the president of the fledgling Josiah Royce Society. The feathers of this bird are new to flight, but I am confident that they shall lift off erelong, especially since this society features the presence of several of us who have a long history of professional society initiations.

As this is a banquet talk, or as I prefer an Address at the Banquet, I take the liberty of beginning with acts of gratitude. Although the scholarly works on Josiah Royce do not match the girth of those devoted to the philosophy of William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey, it is appropriate that we recall the earlier and influential work of J. Harry Cotton and John E. Smith. And, I add here our gratitude to Ignas Skrupskelis for his magisterial annotated bibliography of Royce’s published work.¹ Happily present in this very audience are the towering figures of contemporary Royce scholarship, Frank Oppenheim and John Clendenning, who have cast a very bright light, indeed, on the often opaque life and work of Josiah Royce. Not only has Oppenheim given us an extensive explicato de texte on behalf of Royce, in his latest book he has woven a fabric of thoughts and events as a mosaic of the relationships between Royce, Peirce, James, and Dewey.² As for Clendenning he has given to us a deeply reflective, superbly informed, and exquisitely presented biography of Josiah Royce.³ Granted that one can never recapture the life of another with a full degree of certitude, Clendenning offers us a full-bore visit to the recesses of Royce’s life, cast through the persons and events he embraced and which embraced him. To my mind, it is a primary desideratum in the study of a thinker, inclusive of philosophers, to be apprised as to how it went, with them, for them, around them and against them. I am aware that this judgment is out of favor and subject to dismissal by both the analytic mode and varieties of postmodernism. See, for example, Richard Rorty’s dismissal of Jay Martin’s biography of John Dewey.⁴ For me, no story—no person.

Now I am not saying that rampant clarity is the result of even the most thorough biography. Obviously, such clarity is not available when I am not clear, at all, about my own biography. Recall Royce’s telling of the anecdote about Schopenhauer, who taken for an eccentric by public park personnel was asked, Sir, who are you?, to which Schopenhauer replied, I wish you would tell me. I take seriously that this exchange is found in the very last paragraph of Clendenning’s biography of Royce.

Still, in a masterful biography there comes to be considerable and important clearing up, as when Clendenning reconstructs his version of Katherine Head, Royce’s wife, in his second edition. Along the way, alas, precious stories about the protagonist in any biography can be reframed, squashed to the innocuous, or even rendered apocryphal. This process of revarnishing stories was brought home to me by the recent biography of William James written by the distinguished biographer, Robert Richardson.⁵ Richardson sent me a manuscript of 800 pages and asked me to vet it. I did so. Every page and every line was given scrutiny. He knew some stories that I did not. On occasion I had a William James story of which he was unaware. More significant and even startling was that with regard to the stories we both knew, his telling of them evoked an ambiance which was unrecognizable to me. The same event, the same person, the same philosophical work took on a characteristic of either adumbration or narrowing. So obvious was this that I recalled a line in James’s Notebook: Life is a muddle and a struggle, with an ‘ever not quite’ to all our formulas and novelty and possibility leaking in.⁶ I know something of the life of Josiah Royce and still more about the life of William James, and yet there is a perpetual un tentativo about all of my judgments. In this way, I heed Royce himself. While on his recuperative Voyage Down Under he wrote the following to William James in response to a question from the captain of the ship, then in The Southern Ocean—out of Melbourne, May 21, 1888, as to whether Royce taught his Harvard students about the reality of the heavens, Royce replied:

Even so, Captain, say I, "I teach at Harvard that the world and heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see."

We may not know the full conversation between Royce and the ship’s captain, but we do know that Royce wrote that line in a letter to William James. We have the letter calendared, in volume 6 of The Correspondence of William James, page 603.⁷

Those of us who write, teach, and think about the thought of Royce should not forget that line, for it is damned real.

II

I return now to the title of this address, Josiah Royce—Alive and Well. This phrase is admittedly shopworn, but I rescue it here to describe that marvelously serendipitous discovery of two notebooks containing the reportage by Harry Todd Costello of Royce’s Harvard Seminar offered in 1913–14. Costello told our old friend and colleague Max Fisch, he of sacred memory, how this find happened:

When a shed on the back of my property in Richmond, Indiana was torn down to build a garage, I was brought a dust-covered box. It contained my Harvard notes and papers which I had forgotten, including two stout notebooks on [Royce’s] seminar. I opened at random and found Royce and [T. S.] Eliot in debate.⁸

Namely and directly, Royce—Alive and Well.

Of this Seminar I wrote a review for The International Philosophical Quarterly forty years ago, and I believe that my judgment still has viability.⁹

It would, of course, be very difficult to summarize the contents of this work. Methodology itself is a broad topic, and within its confines the members of the Seminar raised a host of interdisciplinary problems. Costello tells us that it was said of Royce in this Seminary that he put out a challenge to anybody who had some idea to come in and fight. In addition to the nine student members, faculty guests such as Lawrence Henderson (biological chemistry), Elmer Southard (neuropathology), and Frederick Woods (Portuguese history) saw to it that the Seminar had an encyclopedic reach. This is to say nothing of Royce himself, whose prodigious learning is omnipresent as he ranges over the history of ideas, while making pertinent correlations with the pressing issues of his time. Opening up with a development in Boolean algebra, Royce guides the Seminar through a maze of problems such as the concept of fitness, relativity, value theory, system, the nature and limitation of explanation, symbols, causality,