Communal Agency in Josiah Royce

dc.contributor.advisorPratt, Scotten_US
dc.contributor.authorJacobs, Matthewen_US
dc.creatorJacobs, Matthewen_US
dc.date.accessioned2012-10-26T04:03:59Z
dc.date.available2014-12-29T21:12:31Z
dc.date.issued2012
dc.description.abstractOn the common sense view, an agent is an individual. Communities are collections of individuals, but the community itself is not understood to possess a collective, unified agency. Nevertheless, this view stands at odds with frequent ascriptions of communal agency; e.g., "Oregonians are environmentally conscious," "The team played to win," "The LGBTQ community is pro-gay marriage." If we are to vindicate such ascriptions, we need a theory of the "reality of community," the thesis that under certain conditions, a community possesses a unified, collective agency. This work reconstructs Royce's theory of communal agency through his views of purposiveness and the use he makes of C.S. Peirce's "theory of interpretation." I argue that, for Royce, agency is purposiveness and purposiveness always bears the triadic structure of the process of interpretation. Thus, the process of interpretation entails agency whether at the level of the individual or at the level of the community.en_US
dc.description.embargo10000-01-01
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/12425
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregonen_US
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.en_US
dc.subjectCollective agencyen_US
dc.subjectCommunityen_US
dc.subjectPragmatismen_US
dc.subjectRoyceen_US
dc.titleCommunal Agency in Josiah Royceen_US
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertationen_US

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