SCHILLER, FERDINAND CANNING SCOTT. - Philosopher, b. 16 Aug. 1864 at Altona (Germany), d. 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 however 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 to attain a good and is therefore itself a value. The theory of knowledge, of its fundamental forms and categories, cannot accordingly be constructed starting from the idea of a pure consciousness, but must be hinged on the concept of man's total attitude before 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 and the manner in which reality corresponds to the teleology of our activity. S. attempted to give this pragmatistic epistemology a metaphysical foundation. Reality or, more precisely, what is intelligible in it, is anthropomorphic, that is, ordered in such a way as to correspond, in one way or another, to the finality of our action. The world is a whole 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 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).
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