Ep. 380: Josiah Royce on Community (Part One)
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
Mark Linsenmayer
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On sections of The Problem of Christianity (1913) which establish Royce's concept of a community of interpretation: individuals working together with a sense of shared history and expectation. He claims that such a grouping can be counted as a literal mind and that it solves the problem of human meaning.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some folks who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. |
| 0:14.2 | Our question for episode 380 is something like, what is a community? |
| 0:18.3 | And we read sections of Josiah Royces, The Problem of Christianity, |
| 0:21.8 | from 1913. More information about the text and the podcast, please see Partially Examinate.com. |
| 0:26.7 | This is Mark Linson-Myer sundered from the rest of you by chasms of mutual mystery in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 0:32.5 | This is Seth Paskin, breeding cooperation at the expense of a loss of interest in the community in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:39.0 | This is Wes Alwyn, the mere gesticulation of a self in Cambridge, Massachusetts. |
| 0:43.8 | This is Kara Barnett, and I am speaking from Salt Lake City, Utah. |
| 0:48.8 | Well, thanks for joining us, Kara. |
| 0:50.9 | You had recommended Royce to us more than a year ago. |
| 0:55.4 | It was, I think, seven years ago, yeah. |
| 0:57.6 | Oh, okay. |
| 0:58.6 | Well, that's still technically accurate. |
| 1:01.6 | And we knew that Dylan was going to be gone. |
| 1:04.0 | I was combing through emails of recommendations. |
| 1:07.1 | And I think I was intrigued when you had recommended this guy because we just don't cover a lot of |
| 1:12.8 | the lesser known pragmatists is I guess or the American slash British Hegelians. We haven't |
| 1:17.3 | done much of that. And I think this guy falls into both camps a little bit of Emerson maybe is the |
| 1:22.8 | closest figure that people would be familiar with. The term that usually gets used with Royce is |
| 1:27.3 | an absolute pragmatist, which is kind of two terms |
| 1:31.2 | that seem a little contradictory. |
| 1:33.2 | He separated himself from the Higalians, and the pragmatists, the other pragmatists |
... |
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