Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce's Ethico-Religious Insight
Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce's Ethico-Religious Insight
DWAYNE A. TUNSTALL
Copyright Date: 2009
Published by: Fordham University Press
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb
Pages: 192
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x09tb
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Book Info
Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce's Ethico-Religious Insight
Book Description:

This book contends that Josiah Royce bequeathed to philosophy a novel idealism based on an ethico-religious insight. This insight became the basis for an idealistic personalism, wherein the Real is the personal and a metaphysics of community is the most appropriate approach to metaphysics for personal beings, especially in an often impersonal and technological intellectual climate. The first part of the book traces how Royce constructed his idealistic personalism in response to criticisms made by George Holmes Howison. That personalism is interpreted as an ethical and panentheistic one, somewhat akin to Charles Hartshorne's process philosophy. The second part investigates Royce's idealistic metaphysics in general and his ethico-religious insight in particular. In the course of these investigations, the author examines how Royce's ethico-religious insight could be strengthened by incorporating the philosophical theology of Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Emmanuel Levinas's ethical metaphysics. The author concludes by briefly exploring the possibility that Royce's progressive racial anti-essentialism is, in fact, a form of cultural, antiblack racism and asks whether his cultural, antiblack racism taints his ethico-religious insight.

eISBN: 978-0-8232-4728-8
Subjects: Religion
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.1
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.2
  3. Preface
    Preface (pp. ix-xii)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.3
  4. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. xiii-xviii)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.4
  5. INTRODUCTION: ENCOUNTERING JOSIAH ROYCE’S ETHICO-RELIGIOUS INSIGHT
    INTRODUCTION: ENCOUNTERING JOSIAH ROYCE’S ETHICO-RELIGIOUS INSIGHT (pp. 1-6)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.5

    While this book neither mentions nor examines Josiah Royce’s philosophy of literature and literary criticism, I begin this introduction with an epigram that characterizes Royce’s general philosophical temperament. Royce is a poet-philosopher in the sense of being a philosopher who carefully hones words to communicate truths about the world, some of which transcend the boundaries of discursive thought. Like poetry, Royce’s philosophy, at its best, dances on the fringe of ineffability, for example, when he discusses loyalty to loyalty inThe Philosophy of Loyalty(1908), eternity inThe Sources of Religious Insight(1912), and the Christian notions of grace and...

  6. Part I. Josiah Royce’s Personalism
    • ONE THE “CONCEPTION OF GOD” DEBATE: Setting the Stage for Royce’s Personalism
      ONE THE “CONCEPTION OF GOD” DEBATE: Setting the Stage for Royce’s Personalism (pp. 9-27)
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.6

      This book advances a thesis that is contrary to the majority opinion in Royce scholarship: I hold that Royce’s late metaphysics of community¹ is not an extension of Royce’s epistemological and logical concerns but rather an articulation of a living ethico-religious insight, an insight that serves as the animating force behind his entire philosophy.² Even Royce’s earliest philosophical treatise,The Religious Aspect of Philosophy(1885), and its central argument for the existence of an Absolute Thought was not primarily an epistemological or a metaphysical defense of the Absolute’s ontological status as the most real being in existence, but his initial...

    • TWO HAUNTED BY HOWISON’S CRITICISM: THE BIRTH OF ROYCE’S LATE PHILOSOPHY
      TWO HAUNTED BY HOWISON’S CRITICISM: THE BIRTH OF ROYCE’S LATE PHILOSOPHY (pp. 28-50)
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.7

      How did this prolonged debate with Howison motivate Royce to drift away from his earlier apparent absolute idealism? W. H. Werkmeister contends that the 1895 Union debate

      had undoubtedly much to do with the progressive modification of [Royce’s original] position. Royce’s reply to his critics [in the “Supplementary Essay” appended to the 1897 version ofThe Conception of God], as well as his subsequent Gifford Lectures [these lectures were published asThe World and the Individual], show clearly the new emphasis. Some years later, inThe Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce strikes a still different note and begins a line of...

    • THREE ROYCE’S LATE PHILOSOPHY
      THREE ROYCE’S LATE PHILOSOPHY (pp. 51-66)
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.8

      We are now in a position to see how Royce’s later philosophy addresses Howison’s 1895 criticism of his idealistic metaphysics. Since I will analyze just those elements of Royce’s later writings that seem to address Howison’s criticism directly, I will leave aside, for example, such significant Roycean concepts as atonement, redemption, and reconciliation in hisThe Problem of Christianity.¹ Instead I turn to the significance of the will to interpret for the constitution of human personhood and that of the divine Self, as well as how Royce’s late conception of human personhood addresses Howison’s critique of his idealistic metaphysics. The...

    • FOUR ROYCE’S PERSONALISM
      FOUR ROYCE’S PERSONALISM (pp. 67-82)
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.9

      Is Josiah Royce’s personalism compatible with the Boston personalist tradition? We already know that Royce is unquestionably a personalist because he accepts the central descriptive hypotheses of personalism. These are, according toThe Personalist Forum, formerly the official organ of contemporary American personalism: (1) “it is the personal dimension of our being and living that is definitive of our humanity”¹ and (2) “the personal dimension of being-human offers a clue to the ordering of reality.”² Royce is also a personalist because his philosophy embodies Erazim Kohak’s articulation of personalism:

      Personalism is a philosophy predicated upon the irreducibility and primacy of...

  7. Part II. Extending Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight:: Royce on the Beloved Community, Agape, and Human Temporality
    • FIVE ROYCE’S ETHICO-RELIGIOUS INSIGHT: A HYPOTHETICAL POSTULATE?
      FIVE ROYCE’S ETHICO-RELIGIOUS INSIGHT: A HYPOTHETICAL POSTULATE? (pp. 85-95)
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.10

      Until now I have dealt with Royce’s ethico-religious insight as he articulated it from his 1895 “Conception of God” essay through his1915–16 Extension Course on Ethics. I have presumed that Royce’s philosophic propositions described features of our reality in an unproblematic way. Given Royce’s argumentation and his ethico-religious insight, I contended that he holds a personalistic philosophy where God is fellow sufferer and could be viewed as Temporality itself (or, more accurately, as the One whose temporality is the basis for all other sorts of temporality), and where God is partially an ideal (or more specifically, the ideal...

    • SIX KING’S BELOVED COMMUNITY, ROYCE’S METAPHYSICS
      SIX KING’S BELOVED COMMUNITY, ROYCE’S METAPHYSICS (pp. 96-109)
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.11

      The philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., can be characterized as a confluence of several amiable theological and philosophical perspectives. Charles R. Johnson, for example, characterizes it as being a “complex yet ethically coherent philosophy”—a mixture of Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel, Boston personalism, and Mohandas Gandhi’s love-ethic and method of nonviolence.¹ While these ideas are important to King’s philosophy, he was unquestionably most influenced by the African American Baptist tradition.² He accepted Boston personalism, the social gospel movement, and Gandhi’s love ethic and nonviolence to the extent that they strengthened two important convictions he acquired from his Baptist background:...

    • SEVEN COUPLING ROYCE’S TEMPORALISM WITH LEVINASIAN INSIGHTS
      SEVEN COUPLING ROYCE’S TEMPORALISM WITH LEVINASIAN INSIGHTS (pp. 110-130)
      https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.12

      In this chapter I will address a serious problem with Royce’s ethics and how that problem causes his ethics to be an inadequate mode of expressing his ethico-religious insight. The serious problem with Royce’s ethics is that it neglects the origins of ethical experience. Instead, he conceives of ethics as the rational inquiry into how we ought to live. One cannot fault Royce for conceiving ethics in this manner, given that this conception of ethics is the most prevalent one in the Western philosophic tradition.

      There is a danger with this conception of ethics, though; if often seems to consider...

  8. CLOSING REMARKS
    CLOSING REMARKS (pp. 131-136)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.13

    Let me end this book where I began it. In the Introduction, I announced that this book is an apparent hodgepodge of philosophical topics, methods of argumentation, and exegesis. Then, I offered a concise paragraph describing how the chapters of this book hang together as a single philosophical work. Nonetheless, I did not tell the readerwhatprecisely unifies my inquiries into a single work in the Introduction. I gave an intimation of what makes this book a unified whole in the last paragraph or so of my Preface. In it I described this book as the result of a...

  9. Notes
    Notes (pp. 137-170)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.14
  10. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 171-180)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.15
  11. Index
    Index (pp. 181-192)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.16
  12. Back Matter
    Back Matter (pp. 193-194)
    https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt13x09tb.17
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