Background
Hocking, William Ernest was born on August 10, 1873 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States.
Hocking, William Ernest was born on August 10, 1873 in Cleveland, Ohio, United States.
Iowa State University of Science, 1897-1899. Harvard University, BA 1901, Manuscripts and Archives 1902, PhD 1904. The Universities of Gottingen, Berlin and Heidelberg.
1904-1906. Instructor in History and Philosophy, Andover Theological Seminary. 1906-1908, Instructor to Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley. 1908-1914, Assistant Professor to Professor of Philosophy, Yale University.
1914-1966, Professor, Afford Professor of Philosophy (1920-1943), Emeritus Professor, Harvard University. 1946-1947, Visiting Professor, University of Leiden.
Hocking employed the appeal to experience in Philosophy, which he derived from William James. But his pragmatism was, to use his phrase, negative pragmatism’. He held that what does not work cannot be true, invoking an absolute standard, similar to Royee’s ‘absolute pragmahsm. Although a Roycean idealist. Hocking was wary of the impersonal absolute. He sought and l°und the absolute in a personal form worthy of w°rship within the immediacy of personal experience, wherein the individual self mystically enc°unters God. In his theory of man Hocking esteemed the ^’ill-to-power to be the fundamental core of numan nature. Its highest expression is found in lhe missionary religions, especially in Christian- “yStriving not only to control conduct, Christianity seeks also to transform the inner feelings of human beings. For Hocking religion, speculatively reconceived, is the fundament of morality, politics and civilization. Committed to the principle of individual rights and justice, he further believed that traditional liberalism had to be superseded by the co-agent state and an international political system embracing a plurality of nation states. Hocking attributed the turmoils of the twentieth century to the metaphysical confusions of modernity—the separation of self, dwelling in isolation, from the world, subject to scientific and technological mastery. In overcoming modernity. Hocking hoped, mankind would inaugurate a new world civilization. Olympian in literary style and personal manner. Hocking was nevertheless an engaged philosopher. With his wife he founded the Shady Hill School. During the First World War, on assignment from the British Government, he studied military psychology, authoring Morale and its Enemies. A firm internationalist, he was critical of the mandates in Asia and Africa to the major European powers (1932). As Chairman of the Layman’s Foreign Missions, he edited its report Re-thinking Missions: A Laymen's InquiryAfter One Hundred Years. A Member of the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, he wrote Freedom of the Press: A Framework of Principle. Critical of the Allied occupation of Germany in relation to education, he authored Experiment in Germany: What we can learn from Teaching German. Regarding the Cold War he exhorted Americans to trust the Soviet Union on behalf of coexistence in Strength of Men and Nations: A Message to the USA Vis-avis the USSR. The idealist metaphysics expressed in The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912) Hocking later revised to take account of the realities recognized by contemporary philosophies of process and existence, as his Gifford Lectures, entitled ‘Fact and destiny' delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1938, testify.