Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce was an American philosopher, born in 1855 in Grass Valley, California, and died in 1916, who spent most of his career at Harvard University alongside William James and is regarded as the leading American proponent of absolute idealism, the view that reality is ultimately a single all-encompassing mind or spirit. Royce is best known for The World and the Individual, in which he develops his idealist metaphysics, and for his philosophy of loyalty, set out in works including The Philosophy of Loyalty, which treats loyal devotion to a chosen cause as the central organizing virtue of a well-lived life and reworks the Christian ideal of universal community into a philosophical account of the Beloved Community. Although often placed alongside the American pragmatists with whom he debated, particularly his close colleague and rival William James, Royce is generally counted as the founder of a distinct American school of idealism rather than as a pragmatist himself.