Josiah Royce on Families and Communities

Resumen

In this paper I will outline the general lines of his philosophical thought: Royce’s metaphysics of idealism, Royce’s ethics of loyalty and Royce’s pragmatist epistemology of interpretation, these are intimately connected and offer us a novel and very philosophically interesting view of self and community. I will consequently explore some of his core ideas on self and community focused in the process of integration that only family can mediate, i.e., a process of interpretation, and introduce these related to the understanding of how communities work. Finally my aim is to explain how these ideas can have a positive impact in the conception of family as the key integration of self and community in the spirit of the philosophy of Royce.