Jackie Kegley

In this centennial year of the death of Josiah Royce it is appropriate to explore the lines of influence between Royce as a teacher and one of his students, C.I. Lewis. First, Lewis himself acknowledged an affinity between his ‘conceptual pragmatism’ and Royce’s ‘absolute pragmatism’. Secondly, Lewis also acknowledged Royce’s influence in terms of his explorations of alternative logics. Thirdly, Lewis was called the “most influential American thinker of his generation” and a link between the philosophers of the classic period of the Harvard philosophy department and those of the second half of the twentieth century. This suggests an exploration of Royce’s influence forward into...

This collection of essays focuses on the roles that coercion and persuasion should play in contemporary democratic political systems or societies. A number of the authors advocate new approaches to this question, offering various critiques of the dominant classical liberalism views of political justification, freedom, tolerance and the political subject. A major concern is with the conversational character of democracy. Given the problematic and ambiguous status of the many differences present in contemporary society, the authors seek to alert us to the danger, that an emphasis on reasonable consensus will conceal exclusion in practice of some contending positions. The voices of vulnerable peoples can be unconsciously or even deliberately silenced by various institutional processes and operating procedures and a strong media influence can change the tenor of conversations and even lead to deception. To counter these factors, a number of the essays, in differing ways, urge the fostering of local community conversations or democratic agoras so that democratic debate and conversation might maintain the vitality necessary to a strong democratic system.