John said to Ant McWatt: [Royce is] "mainstream" in one way, but highly out-of-fashion and relatively unknown. The reasons are various but the gist of it is that for a long time, not that many people have wanted to discuss Royce, except for a close-knit academical community, going through those channels. I've already started a Royce discussion group but haven't used it much. It needs more publicity and marketing, two traits at which I'm relatively poor.
dmb says: Royce is mainstream but highly out-of-fashion and relatively unknown? And the "reason" Royce is highly unfashionable and unknown is "not that many people have wanted to discuss Royce"? Tap dance much? Royce and Idealism are unfashionable because there are very few theists among intellectuals, especially philosophers and scientists (14% and 7%, respectively). You like to downplay that part of Royce's thinking, not to mention Auxier's and your own, but these views are not going to make much sense to the overwhelming majority of non-theists (86% and 93%, respectively). This state of affairs probably explains why the God-crammers are so full of bluster and anger. There on the losing side of a war. We see the same sort of vitriol among regular folks too, as we see in the persecution complex on display in places like Fox News, the Tea Party, and the fundamentalist churches. On that level, the theists vastly outnumber the non-theists. There's certainly no shortage of God-crammers in the United States but the percentage drops quickly among the highly education and intellectually gifted. Here are a couple of quotes from a review of Auxier's book. They make it pretty clear that theism is the driving motive for this attempt at rehabilitating Idealism, i.e. God-cramming. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/48743-time-will-and-purpose-living-ideas-from-the-philosophy-of-josiah-royce/ "There are hints about Auxier's own position: a process oriented pragmatic personalism with overtones of theistic idealism, but that is not the subject in view. Further, Auxier confronts philosophers with this interpretation of Royce as a call to take up their responsibility to the world to engage in offering conceptualizations of even such difficult ideals as community, individuals, and God." "According to Auxier, "giving up upon the all-embracing thought implies giving up all philosophical meaning, for it implies the unreality of every act of intending." (66) The All-Knower, the actual judge "must be there," where this must is not a logical must but a moral must. Auxier concludes by summarizing that for Royce, "We must choose what we shall believe, but the choice is a moral one, for the merely possible God is also an option, one among many." (66) Royce holds this Actual God as necessary to affirm intentionality, error, and meaning. But the risk is that a God in which everything is known as actual eliminates any possibility for effective will or choice. Without possibility ingredient in the Divine it becomes a cold and bloodless abstraction. Royce resolves this with his argument that God considers counter-factuals as possibles from the perspective of each individual. As Auxier articulates it, God considers "what I might have been and might be, but am not." " And here are a couple excerpts from a recent article in Salon about the present state of theism... "It is easy to believe something without good reasons if you are determined to do so—like the queen in “Alice and Wonderland” who “sometimes … believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” But there are problems with this approach. First, if you defend such beliefs by claiming that you have a right to your opinion, however unsupported by evidence it might be, you are referring to a political or legal right, not an epistemic one. You may have a legal right to say whatever you want, but you have epistemic justification only if there are good reasons and evidence to support your claim. If someone makes a claim without concern for reasons and evidence, we should conclude that they simply don’t care about what’s true. We shouldn’t conclude that their beliefs are true because they are fervently held." "Should you believe in a God? Not according to most academic philosophers. A comprehensive survey revealed that only about 14 percent of English speaking professional philosophers are theists. As for what little religious belief remains among their colleagues, most professional philosophers regard it as a strange aberration among otherwise intelligent people. Among scientists the situation is much the same. Surveys of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, composed of the most prestigious scientists in the world, show that religious belief among them is practically nonexistent, about 7 percent." http://www.salon.com/2014/12/21/religions_smart_people_problem_the_shaky_intellectual_foundations_of_absolute_faith/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
