Josiah Royce
American idealist philosopher (1855–1916), born in Grass Valley, California, in a mining camp of the Gold Rush era, who, alongside William James, one of his Harvard colleagues and great intellectual interlocutors, became one of the central figures of American academic philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though he represented, in contrast to Jamesian pragmatism, an absolute idealist position deeply influenced by Hegel and by British post-Kantianism. His fundamental work, The World and the Individual (1899–1901), develops a metaphysical system according to which ultimate reality is an absolute, unifying, all-encompassing consciousness within which all particular, finite experiences find their meaning and their complete truth, a position Royce defended with an original argument known as 'the argument from error': the mere possibility that error exists demonstrates the existence of an absolute, objective truth from which error is a deviation, and this absolute truth can only ultimately be sustained by an infinite consciousness that knows it completely. Less well known philosophically today than James or Peirce, his most lasting contribution is probably his ethics of loyalty, set out in The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), where he argued that conscious loyalty to a cause transcending individual interest — not an abstract Kantian principle of duty nor mere utilitarian calculation — constitutes the ultimate foundation of moral life, and that genuine faithfulness requires at the same time 'loyalty to loyalty', that is, respect for and fostering of the capacity for loyal commitment in all other human beings. Royce also developed an influential semiotic theory of the 'community of interpretation', inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce, according to which meaning and truth fully emerge only within a continuous community of interpreters sharing the same interpretive process, an idea anticipating central themes of later communitarian pragmatism and hermeneutic philosophy.