Bradley, Francis Herbert
Bradley, Francis Herbert
(1846-1924) Dialectician extraordinary of British philosophy, Bradley sought to purge contemporary thought of the extremely sensationalistic and utilitarian elements embodied in the tradition of empiricism. Though owing much to Hegel, he early repudiated the Hegelian system as such, and his own variety of Absolute Idealism bases itself upon no scheme of categories. His brilliant attack upon the inadequate assumptions of hedonistic ethics (Ethical Studies, 1877) was followed in 1883 by The Principles of Logic in which his dialectic analysis was applied to the problems of inference and judgment. It was, however, his Appearance and Reality (1893) with its famous theory of “the degrees of truth” which first disturbed the somnambulism of modern metaphysics, and led Caird to remark upon “the greatest thing since Kant”. In later years Bradley’s growing realization of ultimate difficulties in his version of the coherence theory led him to modify his doctrines in the direction of a Platonic mysticism. See Essays on Truth and Reality, the second edition of the Logic Collected Essays, etc. — W.S.W.