Josiah Royce

Metaphysics (S U N Y Series in Philosophy) Josiah Royce

This book is an edited transcript of Josiah Royce's last year-long course in metaphysics at Harvard in 1915-1916. Nowhere else did Royce have an opportunity to explain the relations between his two most ambitious works, The World and the Individual and The Problem of Christianity and to show how they complement each other, the former being the 'logical' approach to metaphysics and the latter the 'social' approach. In extended discussions aimed at showing the justice done to realism in his idealistic philosophy, Royce responds to the thought of George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, and R. B. Perry and shows in particular that Santayana's sundering the connections between essence and existence leaves him with an incoherent position that cannot make room for the individual; that Russell's defining the real in terms of truth makes an appeal to possible experience and this goes beyond present fact; and that Perry's celebrated 'ego-centric' predicament is a superficial presentation of what idealism is supposed to mean and is easily resolved.