J・ロイスの絶対的プラグマティズム

カントとプラグマティズムを考える

抄録

Royce's place in the history of American thought is unique. His philosophy is a synthesis of absolutism and a voluntaristic type of pragmatism. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Kant always remained influential in his thought. Thus the core of Royce's absolute pragmatism exhibits a version of apriorism with a constructive epistemology.
His epistemology in turn extends further to comprehending his theory of reality, by which he intends to supplement Kant's philosophy with a new ontological framework. This is what he calls the "Fourth Conception of Being." It states that his approach to reality depends not on the fact that the world is mental, but on insisting that the being of the world consists in the truth of the propositions about it. In this regard his view is opposed to metaphysical realism, and to traditional idealism as well, which takes the world to be mental.
Despite the modern rebellion against such a form of thought, Royce's philosophy still seems to represent an important part of the pragmatistic-idealistic heritage of western thought. The present paper tries to appreciate some aspects of this heritage and to show the close connection between pragmatism and the broadly Kantian approach to truth and reality.