Adrie Kintziger said to john carl:
...It is true that i defended the case that James and Royce were in fact enemy's but irl de facto friends. My point of view was partially derived from the stanford entry about Royce (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/royce/) and after some investigation on this page, the Gifford lectures given by Royce as "the world and the individual", and subsequently thereafter William James "the variaties of religious experience" - as the lead on the stanford page suggested i took the effort to compare the two views, and i had to agree with the remarks on the stanford page under the header "life", if you want/like to find them. I did not invent my point. I honestly found that the narrator was very correct in his analysis. dmb says: The Stanford Encyclopedia is considered to be among the most credible academic sources, right up there with philosophy Journals and University books. And there are many good reasons to draw the conclusion that James and Royce had very different views. It's utterly contemptible to dismiss SEP as if it were just some guy's opinion or to dismiss the basic facts for being the result of "a wrong-headed academic bias". This is just the commonly heard anti-intellectual attitude that says "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge". "For some reason," John says, "I didn't fit in with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Dogmatic Authority, and so not worthy of further discussion or interest" and, he says, "I was ignored and vilified as a troll". William James said that he and Royce loved each other like "Siamese twins," but it's also true that they were opposed philosophically and that James said he wanted to destroy the absolute, wanted its "scalp". Royce was an advocate of Idealism and Monism while James was a Pluralist and a Radical Empiricist. James spells out the difference is one of his essays on Radical Empiricism, a piece called "Absolutism and Empiricism," and the life-long debate between the two men is somewhat famously known as "the battle of the Absolute". "James abused Hegel merrily," his biography says. 'Of all mental turpitude and rottennesses,' he thought, Hegelianism takes the cake. 'The worst of it is,' James told Hall, it makes an absolute sterility where it comes.' James wrote Royce in February 1880, groaning that 'my ignorant prejudice against all Hegelians except Hegel himself grows wusser and wusser. Their Sacerdotal airs! And their sterility!' ...He told Xenos Clark in December 1880, 'The Hegelian wave which seems to me only another desperate attempt to make a short cut to paradise, is deluging the College this year and will, if I am not mistake, completely sterilize its votaries'. ...He added his by now reflexist reaction to Hegel ('fundamentally rotten and charlatanish'), but went on to concede that 'as a reaction against materialistic evolutionism it has a use, only this evolution is is fertile while Hegelism is absolutely sterile'." -- Robert Richardson, William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism, page 214. There are some points in common, of course, but these are very different visions, from different schools of philosophy, held by people with very different temperaments. I see no good reason to pretend they are similar or compatible and l see lots of good reasons for being clear about the distinctions between them. Otherwise it's just the philosophical version of pounding a square peg into a round hole. You're only going to damage one or both of them in the effort. It's wreckless vandalism and if John feels persecuted by this obvious criticism, then he has a problem that cannot be solved by anyone but him. Thanks, dmb 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
