Introduction to Philosophy IX

Josiah Royce (1855-1916) joined the faculty of philosophy as an instructor at Harvard in 1882.1 Previously, Royce worked as a professor in English literature at the University of California. While at the University of California, Royce sought to systematically elaborate the post-Kantian theory of knowledge contained in his dissertation, Of the Interdependence of the Principles of Knowledge, submitted for his doctorate in philosophy from John Hopkins University in 1878.2 Such an elaboration led Royce to develop an increasingly pragmatic epistemology, a nascent phenomenology of consciousness, and arguably the beginnings of a semiotic analysis of representation.3 These strains of thought first began to appear in the dissertation, and would afterward coalesce in a number of manuscripts4 and essays5 written while Royce was still at the University of California, which point toward a growing vision of a systematic philosophy.6 Upon his arrival to Harvard, Royce began work on a series of lectures that represent some of the conclusions to which these developing strains led; culminating in the 1885 publication of that lecture-series as The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, where all the different strains came together in a systematic philosophy of absolute idealism. Thus, the years between 1878 and 1885 represent a transitional period in the evolution of Royce's philosophy from a post-Kantian epistemology to an emerging metaphysics of absolute idealism that begins to situate the strains of Royce's earlier thought into a philosophical system.