The Conception of God Debate
A benchmark in Royce’s career and thought occurred when he returned to California to speak to the Philosophical Union at Berkeley, and ostensibly to defend his concept of God from the criticisms of George Holmes Howison, Joseph Le Conte, and Sidney Mezes, a meeting the New York Times called “a battle of the giants.” There Royce offered a new modal version of his proof for the reality of God based upon ignorance rather than error, based upon the fragmentariness of individual existence rather than its epistemological uncertainty. However, Howison attacked Royce’s doctrine for having left no ontological standing for the individual over against the Absolute, rendering Royce's idealism a kind of pernicious impersonalism, according to Howison. Royce never intended this result and responded to Howison’s criticism first in a long supplementary essay to the debate (1897), and then by developing the philosophy of the individual person in greater detail in his Gifford Lectures, published under the title The World and the Individual (1899, 1901). Simultaneously Royce was enduring a resolute assault on his hypothetical absolutism from James. Royce later admitted that his engagement with the philosophy of Bradley may have led to a more robust engagement with the Absolute than was warranted, and it might be added that his persistent reading of Spinoza might have had similar effects.
Read more about this topic: Josiah Royce
Famous quotes containing the words conception, god and/or debate:
“Whoever will imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment without leaning or inclination, on any occasion whatever, has a conception of Pyrrhonism.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Think ... before the words—the vows are spoken, which put yet another terrible bar between us.... I call upon you in the name of God ... to be sincere with me—Can you, my Annie, bear to think I am another’s?”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“A great deal of unnecessary worry is indulged in by theatregoers trying to understand what Bernard Shaw means. They are not satisfied to listen to a pleasantly written scene in which three or four clever people say clever things, but they need to purse their lips and scowl a little and debate as to whether Shaw meant the lines to be an attack on monogamy as an institution or a plea for manual training in the public school system.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)