Abstract
Recent efforts in the direction of a Royce revival attribute great significance to his two volumed work The Problem of Christianity.1 That the attribution is well deserved will be evident in this third part of our study. For the two themes that are central to Royce’s mature philosophizing dominate his thought in that work, viz., interpretation and community. These form the subject matter for the present chapter and for Chapter XI, respectively. The basis for both themes and the element of continuity between Royce’s later and early thinking is his notion of the Absolute and man’s relation to that Absolute; accordingly, these topics are treated in Chapter X. Using texts primarily from The Problem of Christianity but also from pertinent later manuscripts and other published works of the period we expect to see that in regard to interpretation, God, and Community, the mature writings of Royce definitely show a more pragmatic strain than did his early works.
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References
While The Problem of Christianity was out of print for over 50 years, The World and the Individual was generally considered the main philosophical work of Royce. Today, PC is justly given more attention as the fruit of Royce’s mature philosophical development. In 1968 alone two editions of PC were published: one (used in these Notes) a single volume hardback introduced by John E. Smith, the other a two-volumed paperback foreworded by Jesse A. Mann. (See bibliography for specifics.)
Cf. PC, 278, where Royce names Kant, James, Bergson and Russell as exemplars of dualistic theories of cognition.
PC, 355.
Cf. PC, 292: “Reality, so Bergson tells us,… is essentially change, flow, movement.”
PC, 334.
PC, 336–337.
Cf. PC, 277, 281.
PC, 334.
PC, 295.
Ibid.
PC, 279.
Vol. 84, Undated Material 1915? “The Triadic Theory of Knowledge,” 29.
Ibid., 17.
Cf. Ibid., 18.
Perry, The Thought…, Vol. II, 735–736.
Vol. 84, “The Triadic Theory of Knowledge,” 27.
Cf. Ibid., 20.
Vol. 83, Philadelphia Lectures, Lecture II (second copy), “Theoretical and Practical Truth” (1910 or later), 12.
Cf. Ibid.
Cf. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924; first published by Macmillan, 1908), 373: “[M]y friends, the recent pragmatists, reassert my theory of truth even in their every attempt to deny it.” Hereafter references to this work are abbreviated to PL.
PC, 275.
PC, 274.
PC, 282.
Cf. PC, 31–32.
Unpublished letter to Reginald Chauncey Robbins, November 8, 1914, preserved at the Harvard Houghton Library.
PC, 345.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Royce uses both terms in explaining the same theory of Peirce. E.g., cf. PC, 344: “The method of interpretation is always the comparative method. To compare and to interpret are two names for the fundamental cognitive process.” Cf. also Peirce’s section on pragmatism as interpretation in CP V, #470–93.
That Peirce regards his own theory of knowing as a realism is clear in his writings. See, e.g., CP V, #423: “[W]hat distinguishes it [Peirce’s theory] from other species is… its strenuous insistence upon the truth of scholastic realism.”
PC, 346.
PL, 78. Cf. Peirce’s discussion of Truth as ideal and absolute: e.g., in CP V, # 416 and #494.
Unpublished letter to Robbins, Nov. 8, 1914, Houghton.
Vol. 84, “Illustrations of the Philosophy of Loyalty” (1915?), 10. Cf. Chapter II supra.
PC, 318.
Josiah Royce, “The Mechanical, the Historical and the Statistical,” Unpublished paper read at Harvard Club of Boston, March 1, 1914, preserved at Harvard Houghton Library. Hereafter, MHS.
Cf. HMS, 12.
MHS, 10.
MHS, 12.
Cf. Peirce’s notion of truth as the object of a scientific community of minds, and Chapter II supra.
MHS, 33.
PC, 308.
Cf. Vol. 95, “Comments upon the Problem of the Mid-Year Examinations,” 11, 12.
Ibid.
Ibid.
PC, 307.
The notion of community as end and means in Royce’s philosophy is treated in greater detail in Chapter XI below. Also see my article in Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society, “Community in Royce: An Interpretation,” Fall, 1969 (V, 4), 224–242.
PC, 317.
PC, 319.
Cf. PC, 317.
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© 1972 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Mahowald, M.B. (1972). Knowledge by Interpretation, a Mediating Principle. In: An Idealistic Pragmatism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2736-6_9
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