SCHILLER, Ferdinand Canning Scott. - Philosopher, born on 16 Aug. 1864 at Altona (Germany), died on 7 Aug. 1937 at Los Angeles. He taught philosophy at Oxford and, from 1929, at the University of Los Angeles.
S. is the principal representative of English pragmatism, which he preferred to call personal idealism or humanism. According to S., our thought is necessarily moved and guided by interests of practical purpose, and truth always represents a means of attaining a good and is therefore itself a value. The theory of knowledge, of its forms and fundamental categories, cannot therefore be constructed starting from the idea of a pure consciousness, but must be centered on the concept of man’s total attitude toward reality. The principles of thought are not axiomatic truths, but postulates that express the presuppositions of the success of our action in the realization of the good, and our image of the world represents the degree or manner in which reality corresponds to the teleology of our activity. S. attempted to give this pragmatist epistemology a metaphysical foundation. Reality, more precisely, what is intelligible in 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 system 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 subordinate to the end of the harmony of the whole.
Principal works: Riddles of the Sphinx (London 1891; revised ed. 1910); Humanism. Philosophical essays (ibid. 1903; 2nd ed. 1912); Studies in humanism (ibid. 1907; 2nd ed. 1912); Formal logic. A scientific and social problem (ibid. 1912).