Josiah royce Biography

Josiah Royce

(Grass Valley, 1855-Boston, 1916) American philosopher.He is one of the main representatives of the idealist-inspired American philosophy.Maternal inheritance was the lively religious feeling that, together with the aesthetic sensitivity of his spirit, gave Josiah Royce's philosophical criteria a characteristic stamp.Contact with the German philosophers (he attended Lotze's lectures in Göttingen) completed his philosophical mentality with critical demand.

Josiah Royce

Back in his homeland ( 1876), had as teachers, at Hopkins University, Charles S.Peirce and William James, among others; the second infused him with a pragmatic tendency, and the first with logical-mathematical rigor.Graduated in philosophy (1878), he began an uninterrupted activity as a teacher, writer and lecturer, which made him one of the most outstanding figures of North American culture located in the transition from one century to another.Called in 1882 to the chair of philosophy at Harvard University in Columbia, he remained there until his death.

The various elements of his mental nature and of his cultural formation merged and gave rise to a complete system of his own that the same author called constructive idealism.His masterpiece, The world and the individual (1900-01), matured through a series of studies, among which they stand out for their particular significance The spirit of modern philosophy (1892), in which the author clearly formulates the historical character of his philosophical system, and The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), a text in which Josiah Royce begins the constructive process of the philosophy once the temptation of skepticism has been overcome.

In the latest studies by Josiah Royce, the more specifically ethical and social applications of metaphysics are of particular interest; in The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), this concept appears considered as a fundamental ethical category, and in The Problem of Christianity (1913) the development of the philosophy of loyalty it goes as far as the beginnings of a metaphysics of the community.

Such ideas had been defined in the author's mind in relation to the international environment, which made it possible to sense the catastrophe of the First World War as imminent, destroying the community of peoples.For the last several years Royce had taken great interest in enlightening public opinion on this point.Defender of the North American intervention as an antidote to the forces that caused the dissolution of the aforementioned community, he died before the United States intervened in the conflict.