Abstract
Having explored the general context of Royce’s thought, some explanation and justification for the limitation of the present topic is in order. To that end this chapter aims to explicate the purpose and set guidelines for subsequent considerations. Since the meaning of the term pragmatism has been subject to a variety of historically valid interpretations, clarification of the topic is not an easy task. As early as 1908, Arthur Lovejoy recognized the difficulty of such an undertaking when he attempted to distinguish among various meanings in an article titled “The Thirteen Pragmatism.”1 Some years later F.C.S. Schiller remarked that “theoretically at least, there might be as many pragmatisms as there were pragmatists,” and Giovanni Papini went so far as to claim that pragmatism is indefinable.2 Because of general lack of agreement and/or precision in the use of the term — both by pragmatists themselves and by their commentators, the writer was at first reluctant to use it in describing the aim and topic of this thesis. In casting about for a more suitable designation, however, (e.g., “practicalism,” as suggested by John E. Smith3), none could be found: any term chosen would require careful clarification, and the thesis would have to be developed according to the meaning indicated therein.
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References
Arthur O. Lovejoy, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” The Journal of Philosophy 5 (1908), 5–12, 29–39.
Schiller, “William James and the Making of Pragmatism,” The Personalist 8 (1927), 92, and Papini, “What Pragmatism is like,” Popular Science Monthly 71 (1907), 351. Cf. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Vol. V (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1965), #495. Hereafter the last mentioned work is referred to as CP.
The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1963), 87.
Meaning and Action, A Critical History of Pragmatism (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968).
Ibid., 425.
Thayer further specifies what pragmatism means by the practical character of reason and reality by describing three claims essentially related to that notion, viz., (1) that “possibility is in some sense a trait of reality,” (2) “a behavioral interpretation and analysis of mind and thinking,” and (3) “the purposive character of conceptualization.” (426–9) A common element included in the three claims is their orientation towards future experience: the reality of present possibilities is dependent upon their functioning as anticipations of future experience; thought is our present guide for future behavior; and the purposiveness of our concepts is their directedness towards future results.
E.g., Gabriel Marcel, La métaphysique de Royce (Aubier: Éditions Montaigne, 1945), and Oppenheim, Frank M., “Royce’s Mature Idea of General Metaphysics,” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Philosophy, St. Louis University, 1962.
Similarly, the term pragmatism ought not to be interpreted as constituting the entire philosophy of those who are commonly called pragmatists such as Peirce and James. Certainly the pragmatic element is significantly present in their thought, but not necessarily in so predominant a manner as to define their entire contribution to philosophy.
For an excellent chronology of Royce’s life see Vincent Buranelli, Josiah Royce (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964), 11–13. Another biographical source is Joseph Powell, Josiah Royce (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967). These are the only full biographies on Royce available at present, although another is in preparation by Rev. Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J. Buranelli wrote rather generally of Royce from a literary point of view; Powell wrote of Royce’s place in American history. Oppenheim’s intention is to treat more appreciatively of Royce the philosopher. For Royce’s own resumé of his life see the Autobiographical Sketch which he included in an after-dinner speech at the Walton Hotel in Philadelphia on December 19, 1915, a talk published in The Hope of the Great Community (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 122–36. Hereafter, references to the last mentioned work are abbreviated to HGC.
In the Introduction to the English translation by Virginia and Gordon Ringer, Royce’s Metaphysics (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956), xiv.
Primer of Logical Analysis…; cf. Ch. I, n. 22, supra.
PC, 277.
PC, 305.
PC, 276.
The Thought and Character of William James, Vol. I (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1935), Ch. XLIX, L, LI.
Ibid., 780.
Ibid., 797 and Vol. II, 65.
Roth, 151. Cf. Ralph Barton Perry, In the Spirit of William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938). Perry devotes the entire first chapter to a contrast between Royce and James, claiming that when “we examine the philosophical expression of these characteristic experiences, we find that each man idealized his opposite.” (9)
Perry, The Thought…, Vol. II, 266.
Cf. PC, 276, and William James, Pragmatism and Four Essay from The Meaning of Truth (New York: The World Publishing Company, Meridian Books, 1955), p. 18. Hereafter, Prag.
Cf. John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931), 13 ff.
CPV, #464.
Cf.CPV, #467.
CP V, #402. Note that in this single maxim Peirce uses the term “conceivable” or a form thereof five times. According to Thayer, the recrudescence is “an emphatic attempt to indicate that he was concerned here with ‘intellectual purport.’ ” (Thayer, 87)
Cf.CPV,#402.
Cf. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” in CP V, #388–410.
CPV, #4I4.
Cf.CPV, #413.
CP V, #436. While Peirce generally describes himself as a realist, some of the commentators describe his thought as a metaphysical idealism; e.g., see Edward C. Moore, American Pragmatism: Peirce, James and Dewey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 7. Peirce himself allows that his doctrine be called a “conditional idealism” as long as one means by this “that truth’s independence of individual opinions is due (so far as there is any ‘truth’) to its being the predestined result to which sufficient inquiry would ultimately lead.” CP V, #494.
See Ch. IX in Part Three.
Prag, 42.
Prag, 43.
Prag, Lectures 3 and 4.
Prag, 133.
Prag, 136–137.
Prag, 138, 141.
Prag, 147.
Matt. 7:16. Note the use of future tense and the emphasis on empirical verification as a criterion for knowledge.
E.g., any “process” philosophy such as that of Alfred North Whitehead involves an emphasis on future experience, but that emphasis does not adequately define the specific content of that philosophy. While evolutionary thought in general presents a context which accents future experience, pragmatism is itself a way of philosophizing (“method” in Peirce and James) whose essential and defining emphasis is future experience.
E.g., PC, 279.
Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, ed. by J. Loewenberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919), 85. Hereafter, LMI.
LMI, 86. Pertinent here are James’s own interpretation of pragmatism as broad enough to encompass seemingly contradictory views, e.g., monism and pluralism (cf. Prag, 108), and his effort to show that philosophers and philosophies of the past have been pragmatic in character even if not pragmatic in intent. See, e.g., his reference to the scholastic treatment of the substance-idea in regard to the mystery of the Eucharist. (Prag, 67.) James’s own understanding of pragmatism is therefore broad enough to include Royce’s idealism, even though James persisted in his friendly “battle” with that idealism.
LMI, 257.
LMI, 256.
LMI, 257.
LMI, 257–258.
LMI, 259.
LMI, 258.
Philosophy and Civilization, 24. Cf. Dewey’s claim in regard to James:“We must not forget here that James was an empiricist before he was a pragmatist, and repeatedly stated that pragmatism is merely empiricism pushed to its legitimate conclusions.” (loc. cit.) Despite James’s remark in the Preface to Prag (ix) that pragmatism and radical empiricism can be taken as logically independent doctrines, Thayer observes that “no sharp line divides the pragmatism from James’s later ventures into radical empiricism.” (133)
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© 1972 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Mahowald, M.B. (1972). Possibilities for a Roycean Pragmatism. In: An Idealistic Pragmatism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2736-6_2
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