SCHILLER, FERDINAND CANNING SCOTT. – Philosopher, born 16 August 1864 in Altona (Germany), died 7 August 1937 in Los Angeles. He taught philosophy at Oxford and, from 1929, at the University of Los Angeles.
S. is the principal representative of English pragmatism, although he preferred to call it personal idealism or humanism. According to S., our thought is necessarily moved and guided by interests directed toward practical ends, and truth always represents a means of attaining a good and is therefore itself a value. The theory of knowledge, of its fundamental forms and categories, therefore cannot be constructed by beginning with the idea of a pure consciousness, but must be centred on the concept of man’s total attitude toward reality. The principles of thought are not axiomatic truths, but postulates expressing the presuppositions of the success of our action in the realization of the good; and our image of the world represents the degree and manner in which reality corresponds to the teleology of our activity. S. attempted to give this pragmatist gnoseology a metaphysical foundation. Reality—or, more precisely, what is intelligible within it—is anthropomorphic, that is, ordered so as to correspond, in one way or another, to the purpose of our action. The world is a set of spiritual monads, in which the divine monad has initiated a process of evolution tending toward the unity and harmony of the activities of all individual monads. Only insofar as this process establishes a community or affinity of tendencies is the world knowable, because every form of consciousness is a function entirely subordinated to the end of the harmony of the whole.
Principal works: Riddles of the Sphinx (London 1891; revised edition 1910); Humanism. Philosophical essays (there 1903; 2nd ed. 1912); Studies in humanism (there 1907; 2nd ed. 1912); Formal logic. A scientific and social problem (there 1912).