Background
Rogers, Arthur Kenyon was born on December 27, 1868 in Donellan. New Jersey.
Rogers, Arthur Kenyon was born on December 27, 1868 in Donellan. New Jersey.
Colby College, AB 1891. Johns Hopkins, *891-2. Hartford School of Sociology, 1894-1895.
University of Chicago, PhD 1898.
Instructor, Chicago Academy, 1893-1894. Assistant Superintendent, Charity Organization Society, Hartford, Connecticut, 1895-1896. Instructor in Philosophy and Pedagogy, Alfred University, *899-1900.
Professor of Philosophy and Educall°n, Butler College, 1900-1910. Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri, 1910-1914. 'tale University, 1914-1920.
Rogers was an independent thinker who worked in a number of areas of philosophy. Although one of the critical realists, in the main he belonged to no school, but worked everything out for himself with careful attention paid to established knowledge and common sense. Good sense and balance, based on extensive scholarship, marked all of his ventures. In dealing with philosophical questions as they presented themselves to him, without attempting to fit his views into some preestablished system, he was in some ways a forerunner of what came to be called philosophical analysis, and his work was in general congruence with Sidgwick’s philosophy of common sense: The business of philosophy is to clarify and bring into harmony.. the fundamental beliefs that are implicated in our normal human interests.. this reference to the needs of living.. furnishes the touchstone by which alone the sanity of philosophical reasonings and conclusions can be tested. Also: Systems of philosophy have pretty generally hesitated to concede.. to the common sense of mankind, and 1 have always in consequence found myself excluded from that comforting sense of security that comes from membership in an established.. school of thought. He held a coherence view of justification and a correspondence theory of truth, and that belief, not experience, ‘is the starting-point of our cognitive contact with the world’. Scepticism is.. a demand for a criterion of truth, and.. has assumed an importance in philosophy.. very much out of proportion to the part which healthy doubt plays in our practical life. If in practical life we were to hesitate to act until we had absolute.. certainty, we never should begin to move at all.. Scepticism.. assumes that philosophical truth is.. removed from the business of living [and] divorces philosophy from the rest of life.. whereas life itself is essentially a development. This, from his first philosophical work (1899), foreshadows some of the ideas of Dewey and Moore. Thus: ‘The value of knowledge.. is to be found only in the fact that it contributes, ultimately, to life; it has no use purely in itself, but is meant to be acted upon.' In ethics he held to a mild form of teleological theory combined with a theory of natural rights. A natural right is what a man cannot give up without violating his essential nature. It may be in accordance with justice that a few men only should possess the right to vote; it cannot possibly be just that only a few men should have the opportunity to live a satisfying life. Rogers was highly regarded by his contemporaries and respected for his careful thinking, lack of dogmatism and fairness to opposing views. His works were reviewed favourably, some of them at length, in the major journals of the period, tended to be read and were often cited. No comprehensive studies of his philosophy have appeared and no comprehensive bibliography of his works exists. A bibliography of his papers can be compiled by consulting the comprehensive indexes of the major journals of the period.