ABSTRACT
The recent revival of pragmatism provides a timely intellectual background for the most urgent problematic of the postmodern moment: the complex cluster of questions and queries regarding the meaning and value of democracy. Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln—the grand spiritual godfathers of pragmatism—laid the foundations for the meaning and value of democracy in America and in the modern world. For pragmatists, the future has ethical significance because human will—human thought and action—can make a difference in relation to human aims and purposes. What separates Josiah Royce from other American pragmatists and most American philosophers—though Arthur Danto comes to mind—is his prolonged and poignant engagement with the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer. Royce holds on to his Christian like dramatic portrait of reality—with its hope for and assurance of ultimate triumph—precisely because his sense of evil and the tragic is so deep.
