Royce's Model of the Absolute

At the end of the 19th century, Royce uses the mathematical ideas of his day to describe the Absolute as a self-representative system. Working closely with Royce's texts, I will develop a model of the Absolute that is both more thoroughly formalized and that is stated in contemporary mathematical language. As I develop this more formal model, I will show how structures found within it are similar to structures widely discussed in current analytic metaphysics. The model contains structures found in the recent analytic metaphysics of modality; it contains Democritean worlds as defined by Quine; it contains Turing-computable sequences; and it contains networks of interacting software objects as defined by Dennett. Much of the content of recent analytic metaphysics is already implicit in Royce's study of the Absolute. Far from being an obsolete system of historical interest only, Royce's metaphysics is remarkably relevant today.