[MD] Royce and the American Philosophical Movement

[Matt Kundert]

Bruce Kuklick is probably one of the foremost intellectual 
historians of American philosophy.  And much of the listed 
doctrines fit his base (Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce) and 
Pirsig--somewhat.

The trouble is that I don't think James and Dewey especially 
fit easily into his schematic (particularly "voluntarism"), both 
showing contradictory tendencies.  For instance, by 
focusing on a strain of neo-Kantianism that certainly fits 
Royce, and probably the Dewey of Experience and Nature, 
one has to downplay, not just Dewey's avowed love of 
Hegel, but the downright anti-Kantian tenor of a book like 
The Quest for Certainty.  You can "stress the changing 
character of our conceptual schemes" all you like--it just 
doesn't make the best sense of the movement between Kant 
and Hegel.  If one emphasizes Kant's creation of a notion like 
a "conceptual scheme," and then tacks on, "Oh, and Hegel 
said they change over time," then you've only just paid 
lip-service to Hegel's turn to historicity.  The spirit of Hegel 
is more radical than that, just as I think the spirit of James 
and Dewey was (and Peirce in his right moments).

Royce, to me, just doesn't seem like the right candidate for 
promoting the spirit of Pirsig.  But then again, that should be 
obvious given my recent chanting of, "Down with System, 
Up with Life!"

Matt

> Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:23:33 -0700
> From: ridgecoyote at gmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: [MD] Royce and the American Philosophical Movement
> 
> Beware Bo!  More Royce!
> 
> My question to MD is do you see Pirsig fitting neatly into this movement as
> described below?  I'm not familiar with the details of all the labeled
> doctrines, but reading them with the MoQ in mind I find myself checking them
> off one by one going, yep, yep, yep.....
> 
> I mean, I'm pretty sure the MoQ is a "constructionalist epistemology
> stressing the changing character of our conceptual schemes".  It sure looks
> like one to me.
> 
> 
> 
> >From Bruce Kuklick's Josiah Royce, An Intellectual Biography
> 
> "... we have been told that to trace the story of American thought is to
> trace a peculiar version of experimental Anglo-American empiricism from
> Peirce, to James to Dewey;
> If we wish to examine a secondary theme, we may examine the Hegelian Royce
> who stands outside this tradition, influence by German thought, the leading
> expositor of a different philosophic style, absolute idealism.
> 
> This picture is wrong not merely in detail but in principle.  I have
> indicated that the Cambridge pragmatists--Royce among them--were part of a
> major philosophical movement.  Their pragmatism is a form of neo-Kantianism
> which draws from a set of connected doctrines:
> 
>  A constructionalist epistemology stressing the changing character of our
> conceptual schemes;
> 
> a commitment to a variety of voluntarism;
> 
> A Kantian concern with the nature of possible experience;
> 
> an adherence to the idealist principle that existence does not transcend
> consciousness;
> 
> a distrust of traditional British empiricism;
> 
> a recognition of the importance of logic for philosophy;
> 
> a refusal to distinguish between questions of knowledge and of value;
> 
> an emphasis on the relation of philosophy to practical questions;
> 
> a desire to reconcile science and religion."
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