Josiah Royce (Nov. 20, 1855 – Sept.14, 1916), philosopher and founder of American idealism, was born in Grass Valley, California to English immigrants. His father, Josiah Royce, Sr., was a farmer and salesman. His mother, Sarah Eleanor Bayliss, was a school teacher. Josiah Sr. and Sarah Eleanor married in Rochester, New York, and joined the Gold Rush to California in 1849 before ultimately settling in San Francisco in 1866. In 1870, the younger Royce enrolled in the University of California in Oakland, later the University of California, Berkeley, as a member of the “preparatory class.”

Initially, Royce majored in civil engineering, but changed his major to follow the “classical course” upon encountering the teachings of geologist Joseph LeConte and the poet Edward Rowland Still. In the course, he studied Greek, Latin, Hebrew, modern languages, mathematics, and science. Royce graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1875 with a bachelor’s degree in Classics. He was selected class essayist and delivered the classical commencement address, “On a Passage in Sophocles.”

Upon graduating, Royce departed for Germany where he began his lifelong study of philosophy. After a year abroad, he returned to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. at the nascent John Hopkins University, the American university that most closely followed the German model of an academically rigorous, research-based institution. In 1878, he joined the faculty of his alma mater as an Instructor of English - a fate he likened to “intellectual tuberculosis” as his true passion lay in philosophy. (Clendenning, ANB)

In 1880, Josiah Royce married Katherine Head. Together, they had three sons.

In 1882, after a four year-long instructorship, Royce left California to serve as a temporary Instructor of Philosophy at Harvard - a yearlong post while fellow philosopher William James was on sabbatical. Royce returned to Berkeley as an assistant professor, before departing permanently in 1892 when he became Harvard’s Professor of the History of Philosophy, beginning a decades-long relationship with the University. Royce then served as chair of the philosophy department from 1894 to 1898 and published extensively. Before the end of the century, Josiah Royce was recognized as the “most distinguished philosopher in the United States.” (Clendenning, ANB)

In 1899, Royce was asked to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, thus becoming the first American philosopher to ever receive thar honor. There, he expounded on absolute idealism with arguments “unsurpassed in the history of American philosophy.” (Clendenning, ANB). This moment was a peak in Royce’s career, after which he lost momentum as his works began to stray from philosophy. He published historical essays, outlines on psychology, and other works for nontechnical readers. What was seen as his absolutism came under attack from leaders in opposing schools of philosophical thought, with criticisms from leading pragmatists and realists of the time. In his personal life, Royce suffered a series of tragedies, most notably, the loss of his eldest son who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died of typhoid fever two years after being committed to a mental institution.

In 1900, Royce joined the staff of the Cuban Summer School at Harvard authoring two lectures on child psychology that were then translated and delivered in Spanish by his colleagues, J.D.M. Ford and William Lane. He also taught at Radcliffe, where his students included another prominent teacher in the Cuban Summer School, Elizabeth Glendower Evans.

In 1908 Royce published The Philosophy of Loyalty, the fruit of a decade of his labors (and personal struggles), marking a new growth in his philosophical thought. This work is thought to be his “most enduring contribution to ethical theory.” (Glendenning, ANB) Soon after, Royce extended his philosophy of loyalty to other social and religious issues in two collections of essays titled Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (1908) and William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life (1911).

In 1911, Royce suffered a stroke that left him incapacitated for several months. When he recovered, he wrote The Problem With Christianity (1913) which he delivered in lecture form at Manchester College in Oxford that same year. With the outbreak of World War I, Royce wrote War and Insurance (1914) tying the cause of war to nationalism. After the sinking of the Lusitania, however he abandoned neutrality and supported U.S. intervention in the war on the side of Britain, France, and their Allies against Germany and the Central Powers.

Josiah Royce died on September 14, 1922 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts after battling an illness for two weeks. He was remembered as a man who “conceived of philosophy as a religious duty.” (Harvard Crimson)


Further Reading

1. The papers of Josiah Royce are in the Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

2. Clendenning, John. “Royce, Josiah,” American National Biography (1999).

3. Clendenning, John. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce (1985).

4. Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy (1977).

5. McDermott,. John J. The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, ed (2 vols., 1969)

6. Obituary: New York Times, Harvard Crimson, 22 Sep. 1916. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1916/9/22/death-of-prof-josiah-royce-pafter/