Blackwell Reference Online

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Josiah Royce, philosopher, teacher, and public lecturer, who was born on November 20, 1855 in Grass Valley, California and died on September 14, 1916 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, strongly influenced twentieth-century philosophy in the United States. In his late career he integrated his distinctive form of idealism with a Peircean kind of realism and developed a unique religious philosophy of interpretation that pivoted upon the ideas of community, spirit, and process. His parents, Josiah Royce, Sr., and Sarah Eleanor Bayliss Royce, were Englishborn immigrants to America, who became evangelical 49ers trekking to California. After being taught by his mother during childhood in Grass Valley, young Royce studied at San Francisco schools and did undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley. One year of literary and philosophical studies in Germany, plus two years of graduate studies at The John Hopkins University, led to his doctorate in philosophy in 1878. After teaching English composition at Berkeley for four years and marrying Katharine Head, he began in 1882 his 33-year philosophical career at Harvard. There he became a member of its “great department” in philosophy, along with William James, George Herbert Palmer, Hugo Münsterberg, and George Santayana. Royce had three sons, Christopher, Edward, and Stephen, of whom his promising first-born Christopher died as a ... log in or subscribe to read full text