F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) was the most famous, original andphilosophically influential of the British Idealists. Thesephilosophers came to prominence in the closing decades of thenineteenth century, but their effect on British philosophy and societyat large — and, through the positions of power attained by someof their pupils in the institutions of the British Empire, on much ofthe world — persisted well into the first half of the twentieth.They stood out amongst their peers in consciously rejecting some mainaspects of the tradition of their earlier compatriots, such as Humeand Mill, and responding, albeit in an original and critical fashion,rather to the work of Kant and Hegel.

But it would involve a significant degree of distortion to depict theBritish Idealists as simply choosing Hegel over Hume, as thedenomination ‘Neo-Hegelians’ all too easily suggests. Onthe contrary, they were open to a variety of influences, including thephilosophy of an anti-idealist thinker such as J.F. Herbart and of thesubsequently forgotten but then prominent Hermann Lotze, anindependent mind whose speculations are difficult to classify in termsof the idealist/realist opposition. Upon the whole, the Idealistsrevitalized British philosophy by making it permeable to a richvariety of continental ideas. In this way, they helped prepare theground on which analytic philosophy would eventually flourish, as mostIdealists were very well acquainted with the works of Frege’scontemporaries (e.g. Sigwart) and discussed their ideas in theirlogical treatises. Bradley was a leading figure in this movement oforiginal reappropriation of alien ideas, which he explicitly promotedas the sole antidote to dogmatism and intellectual sclerosis in the‘Preface’ toAppearance and Reality. ‘Thepresent generation’, he said, ‘is learning that to gaineducation a man must study in more than one school’ (p.viii).

It is for his metaphysics that Bradley has become best known. Heargued that our everyday conceptions of the world (as well as thosemore refined ones common among his philosophical predecessors) containhidden contradictions which appear, fatally, when we try to think outtheir consequences. In particular, Bradley rejected on these groundsthe view that reality can be understood as consisting of many objectsexisting independently of each other (pluralism) and of our experienceof them (realism). Consistently, his own view combined substancemonism — the claim that reality is one, that there are no realseparate things — with metaphysical idealism — the claimthat reality consists solely of idea or experience. This vision of theworld had a profound effect on the verse of T.S. Eliot, who studiedphilosophy at Harvard and wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Bradley.

On later generations of philosophers, however, Bradley’scontributions to moral philosophy and the philosophy of logic were farmore influential than his metaphysics. His critical examination ofhedonism — the view that the goal of morality is themaximization of general pleasure — was seminal and stands as apermanent contribution to the subject which can still be read withprofit today. Some of the doctrines of his logic have become standardand unnoticed assumptions through their acceptance by BertrandRussell, an acceptance which survived Russell’s subsequentrepudiation of idealist logic and metaphysics.

Other notable figures among the British Idealists were BernardBosanquet, Edward Caird, T.H. Green, Harold Joachim and J.M.E.McTaggart.

• 1. Life
• 2. Reputation
• 3. Philosophy of History
• 4. Ethics
• 5. Logic
• 6. Metaphysics
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
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1. Life

Bradley was born on 30th January, 1846 in Clapham (then in the countyof Surrey, since absorbed into a much expanded London). He was thefourth child and eldest surviving son of Charles Bradley, a prominentEvangelical preacher, and his second wife, Emma Linton. The family wastalented and well connected: George Granville Bradley, a son from thefirst marriage, was successively Head Master of Marlborough College,Master of University College, Oxford, and Dean of Westminster Abbey;A.C. Bradley, a younger son from the second marriage, taughtphilosophy at Oxford until 1881, and, after moving to literarystudies, held chairs at Liverpool and Glasgow, refused one atCambridge, and became the most distinguished Shakespearean critic ofhis day. Charles Bradley’s ‘Clapham Sect’ (as thisactively evangelical humanitarian group was known at the time) hadstrong imperial connections, including among its members aGovernor-General of Bengal, a Governor of Sierra Leone, severalmembers of Parliament and a permanent head of the Colonial Office.

In 1856 F.H. Bradley’s schooling began at Cheltenham College; in1861 he was transferred to Marlborough College, then under hishalf-brother’s Headship. While at Cheltenham he began learningGerman; he read at least some of Kant’sCritique of PureReason while still at school, though it is not clear that thiswas in the original language. In the winter of 1862–3 hecontracted typhoid fever (at one stage expected to kill him), followedshortly by pneumonia. Surviving both, he was protected from furtherexposure to the rigours of English public school life by leavingMarlborough in 1863.

In 1865 Bradley entered University College, Oxford, as a Scholar,getting a first in classical moderations (Mods) in 1867 but only anunexpected second inliterae humaniores (Greats) in 1869. Theprominent Plato scholar A.E. Taylor, a later admirer of Bradley andsympathetic to his idealism, attributed his reverse in Greats to‘the complete incapacity of examiners whose philosophicalscriptures were the writings of John Stuart Mill to comprehend whatphilosophy meant to the brilliant younger men who were shortly torevolutionize philosophical studies in Great Britain.’ Whetheror not this is true, there is certainly an undisguised contempt forMill and his followers exhibited in Bradley’sPrinciples ofLogic. After more than one failure to obtain a collegefellowship, he was in December 1870 elected to one at Merton CollegeOxford, tenable for life, with no teaching duties, and terminable onlyon marriage. He never married, and remained in his fellowship untilhis death.

In June 1871 Bradley suffered a severe inflammation of the kidneyswhich appears to have had permanent effects. It has been suggested,possibly with malice, that the Bradleys in general were disposed tohypochondria; be that as it may, he was prone thereafter to beincapacitated by cold, physical exhaustion or anxiety, and inconsequence lived a retired life. He took an active part in therunning of his college, but avoided public occasions, to the extent,for example, of declining an invitation to become a founding member ofthe British Academy. Collingwood records of Bradley in hisAutobiography, ‘[A]lthough I lived within a few hundredyards of him for sixteen years, I never to my knowledge set eyes onhim.’ This relative seclusion added an element of mystery to hisphilosophical reputation, a mystery enhanced by the dedication of someof his books to a person identified only by the initials‘E.R.’

But although Bradley devoted himself to philosophy, so that thehistory of his public life is largely that of his books and articles,it is clear that his was not a narrowly bookish existence. To protecthis health, he frequently escaped the damp chill of Oxford winters forthe kinder weather of southern English and Mediterranean seasideresorts. (In the course of one of these travels Bradley met anAmerican engineer named Radcliff, and fell in love with one of hisdaughters, the mysterious E.R. of the dedications.) His metaphysics, astriking combination of the rational and the mystical, makes more thangrudging room for the life of the senses and emotions, and hiswritings, especially his posthumously publishedAphorisms,could not be the work of a man whose experience had been confined tothe study. He liked guns and disliked cats, indulging his preferenceseconomically by using the former to shoot the latter in the collegegrounds at night.

Bradley’s political views are said to have been conservative,though not of a narrowly doctrinaire kind. Although his writingsreveal a religious temperament, he seems (judging by a letter of 1922)to have found the evangelical religiosity of his father’shousehold oppressive, and, perhaps in consequence, the attitude toChristianity displayed later in his writings exhibits a certainambivalence; on the whole, he appears to have been a freethinker. (Toimagine growing up amongst the members of the Clapham Sect, we mightuse John Sutherland’s suggestion that the characters of Edmundand Fanny in Jane Austen’sMansfield Park give us someidea of what they would have been like.)

Bradley’s public recognition included the conferring of thehonorary degree LL.D. by the University of Glasgow (1883), election tomembership of the Royal Danish Academy (1921), of theAccademiadei Lincei and theReale Istituto Lombardo of Milan(1922), and election to an Honorary Fellowship of the British Academy(1923). In 1924, King George V bestowed on him, the first philosopherto be singled out for this very rare honour, the Order of Merit. Threemonths later, after a few days’ illness, he died from bloodpoisoning on 18th September, 1924. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery,Oxford.

2. Reputation

As the above (by no means complete) account of his public recognitionreveals, in his own day Bradley’s intellectual reputation stoodremarkably high: he was widely held to be the greatest Englishphilosopher of his generation, and although the idealists were never adominant majority, amongst some philosophers the attitude towards himseems to have been one almost of veneration. The significance of hiswork and its impact upon British philosophy were recognized by friendsand foes. The second volume of J.H. Muirhead’s prestigiousContemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements —a book which appeared shortly after Bradley’s death andcollected papers by all major philosophers of the time, includingthinkers as hostile to the idealistic outlook as G.E. Moore —opens with the following dedication: ‘To F.H. Bradley, Order ofMerit: To whom British Philosophy owed the impulse that gave it newlife in our time’.

This reputation began to collapse fairly quickly after his death. Thereasons for this are complex, and include matters seemingly extraneousto philosophy itself, such as the reaction against British imperialism(whose moral and spiritual mission had been justified by some idealistphilosophers and undertaken by their pupils) following the Great War.One more locally significant factor was the tendentious but stilldamaging accounts of his views which appeared in the writings of Mooreand Russell following their defection from the idealist camp.Russell’s widely read and justly celebrated ‘OnDenoting’ provides a wonderful example of philosophicalpropaganda. Considering the question whether either ‘The King ofFrance is bald’ or ‘The King of France is not bald’is true or false in the absence of a present King of France, Russellwittily observes that ‘Hegelians’ will conclude that hewears a wig. Russell had a special literary talent for producingremarks of this sort, which could not fail to leave their mark, asthere is no worse enemy than a charming irony. At the same time,Russell does not name any specific authors, nor does he address anyspecific idealist theory. The whole of British Idealism is thus simplydismissed because of its alleged association with Hegel, here ablyintroduced as the acme of absurdity.

Another factor was logical positivism, whose representativesrepudiated metaphysics in general as meaningless: in the first chapterof A.J. Ayer’s anti-metaphysical tractLanguage, Truth andLogic, Bradley is presented solely as a metaphysician and, on thebasis of a single out-of-context sentence, selected for ridicule (p.36). The chosen sentence (“the Absolute enters into, but isitself incapable of, evolution and progress”, which Ayer in factslightly paraphrased from p. 442 ofAppearance and Reality)was Bradley’s expression of the familiar doctrine that ultimatereality, though changeless in itself, constitutes the ontologicalfoundation of our finite world of change and becoming. Ayer offeredthis claim as an example of what he called‘pseudo-propositions’, that is, English sentencesseemingly expressing a meaning but actually devoid of informativecontent; and his malicious remark that the quoted proposition wastaken ‘at random’ fromAppearance and Reality wasclearly designed to implant in the mind of the reader the idea thatBradley’s book largely consisted of such pseudo-propositions.Consequent upon such influences was a change, inimical to idealism, inthe whole style of doing philosophy, a change characterized by thedevelopment of formal logic and the new respect paid to thedeliverances of common sense and of ordinary language. Bradley’shighly wrought prose and his confidence in the metaphysician’sright to adjudicate on the ultimate truth began to seem alien to alater generation of philosophers reared on a mixture of plain talk andformalization and encouraged to defer to mathematics and empiricalscience. But stylistic choices are not philosophically neutral; no oneengaged in producing a system of revisionary metaphysics is likely toaccept limitations imposed by ordinary language.

Such influences ensured that a misleading and dismissive stereotype ofBradley became current among analytic philosophers and established intheir textbooks, so that serious discussion of his work largelydisappeared. One result has been that, despite his seminal influenceon Russell and their extended controversy over fundamental matters,books and articles on Russell can contain few or even no references toBradley. Another is that the incidental textbook references to some ofBradley’s most characteristic, original and significant views,e.g. on relations and on truth, are often based on hostilecaricatures. With a few exceptions (for instance, McTaggart’sargument for the unreality of time), discussion of the work of theidealists has been sparse since the nineteen thirties. Discussion ofBradley began to revive, as did his reputation, in the nineteenseventies, continuing through the following decades up to the presentday. This reorientation does not usually go with an attempt atvindicating Bradley’s overall philosophical outlook. It standsrather in close connection with a revival of interest in the originsof analytic philosophy partly prompted by Rorty’s critique inPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty’s attackencouraged analytic philosophy to self-examination and led somethinkers within that tradition to re-examine the foundational myths atthe basis of their own ways of practising and conceiving ofphilosophy.

These efforts produced significant results; several monographs andcollections became available that correct the inheritedmisconceptions, discussing Bradley’s philosophy in a morebalanced manner. There has also been a revival of interest in hiscritical examination of the concept of relation within the field ofanalytic ontology, yet with apparently little interest andappreciation of those broader speculative issues that so much matteredto him. At the time of writing it is clear that he is still widelyunderrated; it is, however, far from clear that his reputation willever again stand as high as it did in his own lifetime.

3. Philosophy of History

Bradley’s first substantial contribution to philosophy was thepublication in 1874 of his pamphlet ‘The Presuppositions ofCritical History’. Although it was not widely noticed at thetime, it did have an impact on the thinking of R.G. Collingwood, whoseepistemology of history, like Bradley’s, evinces a certainscepticism concerning historical facts and the authority of testimony,and it has had a considerable subsequent influence. Bradley’sviews were inspired by his reading of German biblical critics, andsuch views have been prominent since in religious studies, where areluctance to take at face value testimony of the occurrence ofmiracles which violate the laws of nature is appropriate. ButBradley’s attempt to extend this reluctance to historicalreports in general underestimates the contrast between the uniformityof nature and the variety of human history.

Although its overall argument cannot be regarded as satisfactory, thepamphlet is nevertheless worth reading both for its historicalsignificance and for its value as a fairly brief introduction toBradley’s thought. Some characteristic later themes, such as thefallibility of individual judgments and the rejection ofcorrespondence accounts of truth, here make an early appearance; andBradley’s philosophical style — often obscure, typicallydisdainful of illustrative example, and by late twentieth-centurystandards uncomfortably literary — can be seen in highrelief.

4. Ethics

Bradley’s views on ethics were expressed at length in his firstwidely acknowledged publication,Ethical Studies (1876). Onereason it was noticed is that the book is highly polemical. (Sidgwickcalled it ‘vehemently propagandist’ in hisMindreview.) He did not change these views significantly in later years:in 1893 he described it as ‘a book which, in the main, stillexpresses my opinions’ (Appearance and Reality, p.356n) and at the time of his death was working on a second editionwhich, characteristically, was to retain the original text intact butincorporate additional matter.

Bradley says in his Preface that his object is ‘mainlycritical’ and that the ethical theory of his time rests on‘preconceptions metaphysical and psychological’, which are‘confused or even false’. In this the most Hegelian of hisbooks, his approach is, in a series of connected essays, to workdialectically through these erroneous theories towards a properunderstanding of ethics. Accordingly he tells us that the essays‘must be read in the order in which they stand’, and acorollary of this is that the common practice of extracting one or twoof them (usually the brilliantly written ‘Pleasure forPleasure’s Sake’ and ‘My Station and ItsDuties’) from the whole, on the basis of their individualmerits, can result in a misleading impression of their significancewithin Bradley’s moral thinking: neither represents somefinished position.

The development of this proper understanding begins by examining the‘vulgar’ notion of moral responsibility and the apparentthreats to it posed by the philosophical doctrines of determinism andindeterminism, threats which he argues evaporate once we examine thereality of human action. (A prominent theme in the book is thateveryday moral thought is not to be overturned by moral philosophy.)It proceeds by turning to the question ‘Why should I bemoral?’, which he answers by suggesting that the moral end foreach of us is self-realization. What this is, is then graduallyunfolded through examination of representative philosophical theorieseach of which is rejected as unsatisfactory because of its one-sidedconcentration upon particular features of the moral life.Nevertheless, he thinks, each theory captures something importantwhich must not be forgotten in the proper understanding he aims at.For example, in the third essay, ‘Pleasure for Pleasure’sSake’, a still-classic critique of hedonistic utilitarianism,Bradley argues that its individualism is insupportable, as is itshedonistic conception of happiness as a pleasurable state identifiableindependently of the means by which it is attained (so that it couldin principle be achieved more conveniently than through moralbehaviour). But purged of these errors, the essential utilitarianinsight of the importance of happiness as the point of morality can beretained. Likewise, in the next essay’s examination of a Kantian(if not quite Kant’s) ethics of duty, he argues that from thisconception of morality we should abandon, as the result of a falseabstraction, its idea that duty should be done just for duty’ssake. We can, however, retain the insight that morality requires theperformance of individualduties, provided we are clear thattheir obligatoriness arises from the nature of each duty rather thanfrom some formal principle.

These theories are inadequate because they have a deficient conceptionof the self, a deficiency he begins to remedy in the fifth essay, thefamous ‘My Station and Its Duties’, where he outlines asocial conception of the self and of morality with such vigour that itis understandable that the mistaken idea that it expresses his ownposition has gained some currency. This Hegelian account of the morallife, in which the self is fully realized by fulfilling its role inthe social organism which grounds its duties, is clearly one whichgreatly attracted Bradley, and he seems never to have noticed theimplicit tension between the metaphysical account of the self asnecessarily social and the moral injunction to realize the self insociety. But he finally acknowledges its inadequacy, pointing out, forinstance, that any actual society may exhibit moral imperfectionsrequiring reform from the standpoint of an ideal which cannot beexemplified in the roles available within that society. This leads himnaturally into the next essay’s consideration of ideal morality,where he discusses the scope of morality’s demands on theindividual, and, by a further natural extension, into the seventhessay’s discussion of the distinction between the good and thebad self, a discussion which involves an attempted demonstration thatthe bad self is a kind of unrealizable parasite on the good. This isnecessary to his enterprise: without it, he could not hope to makeplausible his suggestion that the aim of morality is self-realization.But in one way the enterprise still founders: the final essay arguesthat morality is ultimately self-contradictory, depending for itsexistence on the evil it seeks to overcome. Realization of the idealself is thus unattainable through morality, but the book closes bysuggesting that it is still possible in religion.

Some of Bradley’s metaphysical ideas are displayed in hisdefence of his moral philosophy. An example is his claim that the selfis a concrete universal and that the ethical doctrines he criticizesare damaged by their reliance upon abstract notions of the self. Theself isuniversal in that it retains its identity over timeand through many different actions, thus collecting together theseries of abstract particulars which make up its history in a wayanalogous to that in which the abstract universalredcollects together its scattered individual instances (now often called‘tropes’); it isconcrete in that, unlikered it is a real non-abstract individual. For such claims tobe fully convincing, a developed system in which the underlyingmetaphysical ideas are fully worked out is needed, as he himselfadmitted. But in this later working out, most of it inAppearanceand Reality, the expression ‘concrete universal’almost disappears from Bradley’s vocabulary, mainly because heeventually concludes that there can be only one such thing;nevertheless, the idea involved remains, reappearing in the form ofthe recurring theme that abstraction is falsification, and in thisform is central to his logic and his metaphysics.

5. Logic

Bradley’s most sustained treatment of logic comes inThePrinciples of Logic, published contemporaneously withFrege’sGrundlagen. The benefit of hindsight provides astriking contrast between these works, the former apparently lookingback to the nineteenth century, the latter anticipating the twentieth.While both books eschew formal methods, in Frege’s case thisresults merely from an attempt to give a readable account of someapplications of mathematical logic. But the absence of formulae(theorems, axioms, rules of inference) from Bradley’s book isintrinsic to it, expressing an opposition (shared by Mill) to theformalization of reasoningin principle, as detachinginference from the practical acquisition of scientific knowledge.This, together with the fact that familiar terms (e.g.‘contradiction’) are used in unfamiliar ways, gives thebook an archaic feel. Nevertheless, and despite the fact thatPrinciples would no longer ordinarily be consulted by amodern logician unless for historical purposes, it focuses on issuescentral to logic, and the impression of its being backward-looking isto some extent misleading: for example, it uses the older vocabularyof ‘ideas’ and ‘judgments’ to express viewswhich, often through their (selective) impact upon Russell, gave riseto doctrines subsequently expressed in terms of sentences andpropositions; and it effectively exposed the notions of meaning andreference to a sceptical scrutiny which has continued long since.

Although the treatment is less rigidly dialectical than that ofEthical Studies, Bradley develops his views through criticismof others, and alters them as he goes along. One result is that thebook is far from easy toconsult, and a reader determined tofind out what Bradley thinks must be prepared to follow its argumentthrough many twists and turns, including occasional incursions intothe fields of epistemology, phenomenology, and metaphysics.

Traditionally, logic books came divided into three parts, dealingrespectively with Conception (usually viaideas, thetraditional components of judgments), Judgment and Inference. Bradleyboth inherits and transforms this tradition, keeping the three-partformat but devoting the first to Judgment and both second and thirdparts to Inference, thus dropping the separate treatment ofConception. This is significant in that it reflects his rejection ofthe standard view that judgments are formed by somehow conjoiningideas: for example, the Port-RoyalLogic’s Aristotelianclaim that they are ‘necessarily composed of three elements— the subject-idea, the attribute, and the joining of these twoideas’. Bradley attacks such doctrines on more than onefront.

He argues, for instance, that those who, like Hume, think judgments toconsist of separable ideas, fail to identify the sense of‘idea’ in which ideas are important to logic: ideas inthis sense are not separate and datable psychological events (such asmy now visualizing a rainbow) but abstract universals. Once ideas areproperly understood, he suggests, they can no longer even plausibly bethought of as individual and mutually independent entities which canbe put together to create a judgment (as Locke maintains in ChapterXIV of Book IV ofAn Essay Concerning Human Understanding):the order of dependence is the opposite, ideas being abstractions fromcomplete judgments. This theory could be aptly referred to as the‘monistic’ theory of judgment, as the parallel withBradley’s metaphysical views is immediately evident: therejection of independent substances held together by relational tiesgoes hand in hand with the rejection of independent ideas heldtogether by the copula. Equally evident is the challenge this posesfor earlier conceptions of analysis as the decomposition of a complexinto its simple constituents, for on this view there are noconstituents to begin with. Here, albeit in his archaic vocabulary,Bradley identifies in advance the difficulties which Russell was laterto face in trying to reconcile the unity of the proposition with whathe thought to be the mutual independence of its constituents,difficulties which appeared in another guise for Frege in his attemptto maintain a strict division between concepts and objects.

Further, given that ideas are universals, accounts like that ofPort-Royal make it impossible to see how judgment can be aboutreality, since its ideas represent kinds of things, while those realthings themselves are particular; so long as judgment is confined toideas, there can be no unique identification of any item about whichwe judge. Bradley applies the point to language, arguing that evengrammatically proper names and demonstratives are disguised generalterms. Even spatial and temporal specifications (X as the object/eventoccupying location Z at time Y) fail as unambiguous principles ofindividuation; they would indeed be able to successfully individuateparticular objects/events within a given spatiotemporal series, yetthey would not be able to differentiate one spatiotemporal series fromanother. The final outcome is that reference cannot be fixed solely interms of language and abstract descriptions; it rather presupposes animmediate encounter in reality through our experience.

These insights appear to anticipate that application ofRussell’s Theory of Descriptions in which it is used toeliminate grammatical names in favour of quantified general sentences.Whether or not this is actually the origin of that theory, there is nodoubt in another case: Russell, who claimed in correspondence to havereadPrinciples closely, acknowledged openly that he wasconvinced by Bradley’s argument that the logical form ofuniversal sentences is hypothetical (so that, e.g., ‘All cowseat grass’ is to be understood as saying ‘If anything is acow then it eats grass’). In this way, Bradley had asignificant, if indirect, impact on predicate calculus. His role as aprecursor of modern logic should not be overemphasized, however, sincehe acknowledges that the interpretation of universal sentences ashypothetical was suggested to him by his reading of Herbart.

Bradley’s own account of judgment is that it is ‘the actwhich refers an ideal content ... to a reality beyond the act’,so that the logical form of every judgment is ‘Reality is suchthat, if anything is S then it is P’. This formulation makesintelligible what is superficially paradoxical in Bradley, when hesays: ‘All judgments are categorical, for they all do affirmabout the reality, and assert their content of that. Again, all arehypothetical, for not one of them can ascribe to reality its contentunconditionally’ (Principles, Bk I, Ch. II, sec. 79,modified according to Bradley’s notes to the Second Edition). Itis not hard to see in this an informal anticipation of therepresentation of sentences in terms of a combination of universalquantifier and object- and predicate-variables. Consider alsoBradley’s treatment of sentences about fictional entities, suchas ‘There are no ghosts’. On Bradley’s analysis,this turns out to be a condensed form for ‘Reality is no placewhere ghosts exist’. One sees here the close similarity withRussell’s Theory of Descriptions, where a negative existentiallike ‘Pegasus does not exist’ is not a statement about anon-existent Pegasus, but simply asserts that the universe ofdiscourse (now playing the logical function of Bradley’s‘Reality’) does not contain any individuals that possessall features ascribed to Pegasus in books of mythology. (Here aselsewhere the book looks forward as well as back.)

Despite these significant steps in the direction of later logicaltheories, it is an exaggeration to claim, as some have done, thatBradley’s strictures on the account of judgment as a combinationof ideas mean that he is straightforwardly opposed to psychologism inlogic, for it is clear that he thinks logic’s subject matter tobe mental acts, not sentences or statements. This is already evidentin his definition of judgement as ‘the act which refers an idealcontent... to a reality beyond the act’ (Principles, BkI, Ch. I, sec. 10).

Bradley continues to criticize traditional logic when he turns fromjudgment to inference. Just as he rejected the Aristotelian account ofjudgments as combinations of subject and predicate, he rejectsAristotelian syllogistic (for the same reason as he later rejectsMill’s canons of induction): it misses the fact that reasoningcan take place only through the generality involved in universals.Universals are thus essential to inference, and for this reasonHume’s account of inference in terms of the association of ideascollapses: Humean ideas are particulars, fleeting episodes whichcannot be revived by association. This does not mean that associationof ideas is impossible, but genuine association (which Bradley calls‘redintegration’) can involve only universals.

Surprisingly for those who subscribe to the common view, firstbroadcast by Russell in 1900 inA Critical Exposition of thePhilosophy of Leibniz and much repeated thereafter, that Bradleythought all judgments to be of subject/predicate form and accordinglyfailed to recognize relational judgments as a distinct kind,Bradley’s treatment of inference includes the complaint that themathematical logics of his time cannot represent valid relationalinferences. His own initial account of inference is that it is‘ideal experiment’: ‘ideal’ in that these arethought-experiments which remain in the realm of idea, butnevertheless experiments in that their results are not guaranteed inadvance by a complete set of logical laws which infallibly determinetheir own application (a view reminiscent of Wittgenstein). But later,after a long and tangled consideration of the question of how it ispossible for a deductive inference to be reflected in reality, hecomes up with a revised account: ‘Every inference is the idealself-development of an object taken as real’(Principles, Terminal Essay I, p. 598). Bradley seems here tobe following the Humean idea that there are no logical relationsbetween distinct existences: the reason that valid inference can bereflected in reality is that it can never take one beyond the originalsubject matter.

Much ofThe Principles of Logic is polemical, and it affordsoccasional examples of Bradley at his funniest and most acerbic, suchas this note to a short chapter criticizing Herbert Spencer’sview of the nature of inference (Bk II, Pt II, Ch. II, sec. 14, n.3),

With regard to Mr. Spencer’s view I would suggest, as apossibility, that it never was taken from the facts, but was adevelopment of or from something about Comparison which he found inHamilton. Reading so few books, Mr. Spencer was naturally more at themercy of those he did read.

and this passing swipe at Hamilton himself (Bk II, Pt II, Ch. I, sec.9),

This may be called the law of Redintegration. For we may take thisname from Sir W. Hamilton (Reid, p. 897), having foundnothing else that we could well take.

It is clear that much of Bradley’s criticism of his predecessorsand contemporaries expresses his hostility to the sort ofpsychological atomism evident in extreme form in Hume but equally tobe found presupposed in accounts of judgment like those mentionedabove. What Bradley particularly objected to about such views is thatthe particulars (ideas) which they treated as realities in their ownright, and out of which judgments are said to be composed, areanything but: far from being themselves genuine individuals, they areabstractions from the continuous whole of psychological life andincapable of independent existence. This is an early version of aholism which has since had many adherents. But he then goes on topoint out that judgments too involve abstractions, since the subjectmatter of any judgment is necessarily detached from its background(as, for example, ‘Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon’detaches the river from its location and the general from his army)and this process inevitably misrepresents the way things really are.Thus the objections which Bradley deployed against misleading accountsof logic now begin to pose a threat against logic itself by erodingthe integrity of the judgments which go into its inferences, and heendsPrinciples in a sceptical vein by suggesting that nojudgment is ever really true nor any inference fully valid.

In addition to his discussion of the nature of ideas, judgment andreference, the emphasis he gives to the notion of truth is anothermain way in which he helped shaping the agenda of later analyticphilosophy. At this point Bradley’s attempt to write a book onlogic without getting entangled in metaphysics begins to succumb tohis doubts about the notion of truth. He holds that logic presupposesa correspondence theory of truth (he calls it the ‘copy’theory), but it is apparent that he thinks this theory metaphysicallyinadequate: indeed, he marshals against it counter-examples drawingon, e.g., disjunctions, counter-examples which had to await the theoryof truth-functions before they could be accommodated. InEssays onTruth and Reality he takes these ideas further, arguing for‘the identity of truth knowledge and reality’ (p. 113) andvehemently rejecting all alternatives, including not solely thecopy-theory, but also any understanding of the concept of truth interms of pragmatic success. It could hardly be clearer that Bradleyholds an identity theory of truth, and although he is commonlybelieved to have been a supporter of a coherence theory of truth (andis standardly identified as such in the textbooks), this common beliefis at the very least greatly misleading. However, the combination ofthe identity theory and his metaphysical doctrine that reality is aunified whole enables coherence to be deduced from his views as aconsequence, and he himself thought thetest of truth to be‘system’, a notion under which he included what iscommonly meant by coherence; this explains why he has so often beenthought to be a coherence theorist. It might be thought that hisfamous attack on the Hegelian idea that the rational is the real(Principles Bk III, Pt II, Ch. IV, sec. 16) is inconsistentwith his holding an identity theory of truth: but the two arereconciled through his doctrine of degrees of truth, a doctrine whichhas to be understood within the context of his metaphysics.

6. Metaphysics

After the completion ofThe Principles of Logic, Bradleyturned to the task of giving a full account of his metaphysics. Theresult wasAppearance and Reality (1893). But Bradley wasphilosophically active for a further thirty years thereafter,continuing to elucidate, defend and refine his views, and engagingwith critics and rivals (notably, and revealingly for both sides, withRussell). Concentration uponAppearance and Reality alone,therefore, risks placing undue weight upon what turn out to betemporary features of thought or expression, and this has in factcontributed to the distorted impressions of his thinking so often tobe found in the textbooks of analytic philosophy.

Appearance and Reality is divided into two books. The first,‘Appearance’, is brief, and its aim destructive, arguingthat ‘the ideas by which we try to understand theuniverse’ all bring us ultimately to contradictions when we tryto think out their implications. Some of these ideas belong especiallyto philosophy, such as the view that only the primary qualities arereal and the Kantian notion of a thing-in-itself; others, for instancethe notions of cause, motion, self, space, thing and time, aredeployed in everyday life. The second book, ‘Reality’, islong; its aim is to provide a positive account of the Absolute —the ultimate, unconditioned reality as it is in itself, not distortedby projection through the conceptual mechanisms of thought. A largeproportion of his discussion is devoted to consideration of naturalobjections to this positive account.

Much of Book I involves presentation of familiar suggestions whichmake only part of Bradley’s case: he alleges, for example, thatmotion involves paradoxes, and that primary qualities alone cannotgive us reality, for they are inconceivable without secondaryqualities, and that the notion of the thing-in-itself isself-contradictory, for if we really know nothing about it, then noteven that it exists. But Chapters II and III — respectivelyentitled ‘Substantive and Adjective’ and ‘Relationand Quality’, are uniquely Bradleian, alarming in the breadth oftheir implications, and have caused intermittent controversy eversince. In generalized form, Bradley’s contention is thatrelations (such asgreater than) are unintelligible eitherwith or without terms, and, likewise, terms unintelligible either withor without relations. Bradley himself says of the arguments he wieldsin support of this contention (p. 29),

The reader who has followed and has grasped the principle of thischapter, will have little need to spend his time on those whichsucceed it. He will have seen that our experience, where relational,is not true; and he will have condemned, almost without a hearing, thegreat mass of phenomena.

It is clear that his views on relations are both highly controversialand central to his thought. In view of this, it would appear a serioustactical error on Bradley’s part to present his arguments sosketchily and unconvincingly that even sympathetic commentators havenot found it easy to defend him, while C.D. Broad was able to saylater, ‘Charity bids us avert our eyes from the pitiablespectacle of a great philosopher using an argument which woulddisgrace a child or a savage’ (Examination, p. 85).

In spite of Bradley’s laconic style, however, the exegeticalerrors of his critics are hard to justify. The impression thatBradley’s crucial metaphysical arguments are negligible arisesin part from reading them as designed to prove the doctrine of theinternality of all relations — that is, either (1) theirreducibility to qualities, or (2) their holding necessarily, dependingon the sense of ‘internal’, Russell having interpreted thedoctrine in the former way, Moore in the latter. Whichever sense wetake, this is a misreading — and an impossible one, if we take‘internal’ in Russell’s sense, because ofBradley’s rejection of the subject/predicate account of judgmentas ‘erroneous’. If, however, we use Moore’s sense of‘internal’, the reading is understandable, albeit stillinexcusable: in Chapter III Bradley confusingly applies this word torelations in a metaphysically innocent way which has no connectionwith the doctrine of internality as this is understood by Moore, whilein other parts ofAppearance and Reality he openly flirtswith the doctrine of internality, repudiating it clearly only in laterworks less often read, such as the important essay‘Relations’ left incomplete at his death and published inhisCollected Essays of 1935. Further, Bradley does uniformlyreject the reality of external relations, and it is easy, though notlogically inevitable, to interpret this as a commitment to thedoctrine of internality.

Bradley’s treatment of relations originates in Chapter II with adiscussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individualthing. How can we make sense of the fact that asingle thing,such as, say, a lump of sugar, is capable of holding aplurality of different properties into a unity, such as itssweetness, whiteness and hardness? We cannot postulate the existenceof an underlying substance distinct from its qualities, for this wouldcommit us to the existence of a naked, bare particular, the absurdconception of a something devoid of all qualities. Moreover, theoriginal difficulty as to the unity of the thing is left unsolved bythis move, since it becomes possible to ask what it is that binds thequalities to their substance. The alternative is to conceive the thingas a collection of qualities, yet what is the nature of theontological tie that binds them into the unity of the thing? We areleft with anaggregate of independent, substance-likequalities, rather than with anindividual thing. At thispoint, the problem of relations emerges in its full ontologicalsignificance, for it now looks as if only a relation could provide therequirednexus.

Bradley’s considered view in Chapter III is that neitherexternal nor internal relations possess unifying power and musttherefore be rejected as unreal. This is the proper conclusion of aset of condensed arguments which he deploys as a team, systematicallyexcluding the possible positions available to those who woulddisagree. One crucial consideration is based upon the insight that arelation is the ‘ground’ of its terms as well as‘founded’ upon them. ‘So far as I can see’, hesays, ‘relations must depend upon terms, just as much as termsupon relations’ (Appearance, p. 26). The relation issaid to ‘depend’ upon its terms, because it requires atleast two terms in order to exist; and terms ‘depend’ uponrelations, because they are partly constituted by the relationships inwhich they stand to one another (albeit Bradley provides noillustration, this can be made plausible by considering two differentshades of colour: blue would not be blue, if it were not darker thanyellow). Once this is recognized, Bradley goes on to argue, one seesthat a related termA is really made up of two parts, onefunctioning as the foundation of the relation,A1, and theother determined by it,A2. Thus, each related term turns outto be a relational complex, in this specific case,A turningout to be the complexR(A1,A2). Thislaunches a regress, for by the same logicA1 andA2will have to be made up of two distinct parts, and so on withoutend.

The member of Bradley’s team of arguments which has attractedthe greatest polemical attention, however, is the one which allegesthat if a relation were a further kind of real thing along with itsterms (as, e.g., Russell later assumed in his multiple relation theoryof judgment), then a further relation would be required to relate itto its terms, and so onad infinitum. It is clear from thisargument (which is an obvious descendant ofThe Principles ofLogic’s attack on the traditional analysis of judgment), aswell as from his own explanation, that for him ‘real’ is atechnical term: to be real is to be an individual substance (in thesense commonly found in Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza). On thisunderstanding, to deny the reality of relations is to deny that theyare independent existents. It is this argument which explainsreactions like Broad’s: in common with others, he took Bradleyto be assuming that relations are a kind of object, when what Bradleywas doing was arguing by a kind ofreductio against that veryassumption.

These remarks make it clear that Bradley is using the term‘appearance’ in an ontological sense, as referring to whatlacks full individuality, rather than in an epistemological sense, asreferring to what is present to a subject. And indeed, he does notwish to deny the obvious fact that we experience a rich diversity ofthings; relations and pluralityin some sense exist, andtherefore belong to reality. The denial of the reality of relationsdoes not imply their absolute non-existence; rather, his conclusion isthat relations and terms should be conceived as aspects within anall-embracing whole. Instead of ascribing to Bradley the doctrine ofinternality, it would therefore be better to see him as advocating a‘holistic’ theory of relations. As against Russell,Bradley was wholly explicit on this fundamental point:

This is the doctrine for which I have now for so many years contended.Relations exists only in and through a whole which can not[sic] in the end be resolved into relations and terms.‘And’, ‘together’ and ‘between’,are all in the end senseless apart from such a whole. The oppositeview is maintained (as I understand) by Mr. Russell... But for myself,I am unable to find that Mr. Russell has ever really faced thequestion. (Principles, 2nd edn, Ch. II, additional note 50).

Interestingly, one philosopher who faced Bradley’s questionsquarely was Russell’s pupil, Wittgenstein. In hisTractatus he tried to avoid Bradley’s regresses bygetting rid of relations. His simple objects do enter into theformation of unified facts, yet no extraneous connecting principle isrequired:‘In the atomic fact objects hang one in another, likethe links of a chain.’ (2.03). The metaphor of a chain, however,provides no real answer to the problem raised by Bradley, especiallyso in light of the fact that it is all but clear thatWittgenstein’s logico-ontological atoms can be said to possess aform; surely, they differ from Democritean atoms in that they lackmaterial properties (cf. 2.0331 and 2.0232). Moreover, Bradley couldstill argue that the very idea of two distinct but unrelated objectsmakes little sense.

The implications of Bradley’s treatment of relations are notsolely metaphysical; they are also epistemological. Some have thoughtthat the denial of the reality of relations amounts to the assertionthat all relational judgments are false, so that it is, for example,not true that 7 is greater than 3 or that hydrogen is lighter thanoxygen. Such an interpretation is made credible by Bradley’saccount of truth, for on that account no ordinary judgment is everperfectly true; in consequence, to one who reads him under theinfluence of the later but anachronistic assumption that truth istwo-valued, his claim appears to be that relational judgments are allfalse. On Bradley’s account of truth, however, while forordinary purposes it is true that 7 is greater than 3 and false thatoxygen is lighter than hydrogen, once we try to meet the more exactingdemands of metaphysics we are forced to recognize that truth admitsdegrees and that, while the former is undoubtedly more true than thelatter, it is not fully true. The imperfection of even the more trueof these judgments, though, is nothing to do with the its beingrelational rather than predicative. For, as was observed above in thesection on Logic, Bradley thought all judgments to be defective inthat representation can proceed only on the basis of separating inthought what is not separate in reality: when, for example, we say‘These apples are hard and sour’, we not only implicitlyabstract the apples from their container but detach the hardness andsourness from each other and abstract them from the apples themselves.A perfect truth, one completely faithful to reality, would thus haveto be one which did not abstract from reality at all; and this meansthat it would have to be identical with the whole of reality andaccordingly no longer even a judgment. The final truth about realityis, on Bradley’s view, quite literally and in principleinexpressible. Eventually, it is this mystical conclusion whichexplains his forceful rejection of Hegel’spanlogism;contrary to Hegel’s view in theScience of Logic,Reality is not a system of interrelated logical categories, buttranscends thought altogether.

It is, however, possible to give an outline. The impression ofreality’s consisting of a multiplicity of related objects is aresult of the separations imposed by thought; in fact ‘theAbsolute is not many; there are no independent reals.’ (Allquotations from here on are fromAppearance and Reality, Ch.XIV.) Reality is one — but one what? Experience, he says, in awide sense of the term: ‘Feeling, thought and volition (anygroups under which we class psychological phenomena) are all thematerial of existence, and there is no other material, actual or evenpossible.’ The immediate argument he gives for this unintuitivedoctrine is brief to the point of offhandedness, merely challengingthe reader to think otherwise without self-contradiction; his greaterconcern is to make it quite clear that this experience does not belongto any individual mind, and his doctrine not a form of solipsism. Buthe is not quite as offhand as he appears, for he soon makes clear thathe thinks the whole book to be a best-explanation argument for thisobjective (or absolute) idealism: ‘This conclusion will, Itrust, at the end of my work bring more conviction to the reader; forwe shall find that it is the one view which will harmonize allfacts.’

So ‘the Absolute is one system, and ... its contents are nothingbut sentient experience. It will hence be a single and all-inclusiveexperience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. For itcannot be less than appearance, and hence no feeling or thought, ofany kind, can fall outside its limits.’ But how can weunderstand this diversity to be possible, when it cannot be accountedfor through terms and relations? Bradley’s answer is that wecannot understand this in detail, but can get some grasp on what hemeans by considering a pre-conceptual state of immediate experience inwhich there are differences but no separations, a state from which ourfamiliar, cognitive, adult human consciousness arises by imposingconceptual distinctions upon the differences. Reality is like thisprimitive state, but not exactly like, for it transcends thoughtrather than falls short of it, and everything, even conceptual thoughtitself, is included in one comprehensive and harmonious whole.Appearances thus contribute to Reality in a fashion analogous to theways in which segments of a painting contribute to the whole work ofart: detached from their background, they would lose theirsignificance and might in isolation even be ugly; in context, they canthemselves be beautiful and make an essential contribution to thebeauty and integrity of the whole.

Such limited comparisons are all the help we can get in understandingthe Absolute and its relation to its appearances: Bradley rejects asimpossible the demand for detailed explanations of how phenomena likeerror and evil belong to the Absolute, instead trying to shift theburden of proof to critics who express confidence in theirincompatibility. His general answer is that anything that exists, eventhe worst of evils, is somehow real: the Absolute must comprehend bothevil and good. But, just as truth admits of degrees, a judgment beingless true the further it is from comprehending the whole of reality,so (consistent with ‘the identity of truth knowledge andreality’) reality itself admits of degrees, a phenomenon beingthe less real the more it is just a fragmentary aspect of the whole.The Absolute is in such a way further from evil than from good, but isitself neither, transcending them both as it transcends even religion— it is in a sense a Supreme Being, but not a personal God. Theproper object of a complete system of metaphysics should be that ofadjudicating the relative degree of reality of any fragmentaryexistent, yet as some critics objected, it is difficult to see howthis could be carried out even in principle, given Bradley’scontention that the Absolute is, strictly speaking, unknowable.

Bradley also devotes some time to a consideration of issues that arisein the philosophy of nature; albeit it is evident that he feels theattraction of panpsychism, this is a view he never explicitlyendorses. As T.S. Eliot recognized, a Leibnizian strand pervadesBradley’s philosophy, one which finds expression in his doctrineof finite centres of experience. On this view, the Absolutearticulates itself in a plurality of lesser sentient wholes, unifiedpsychical individuals of the nature of the human soul. Bradley thuscomes close to holding something very like a theory of monads, yetthis is incorporated within the general framework of his monisticmetaphysics. Interestingly, the doctrine of the Absolute can be seenas a solution to the problem of monadic interaction; likeLeibniz’s monads, Bradley’s finite centres are incapableof a direct sharing of content (e.g., they are said to be ‘notdirectly pervious to each other’;Appearance, p. 464)and of causal interaction; however, they are coordinated to oneanother in that they are all partial manifestations of the sameoverarching Reality. A similar attempt at reconciling AbsoluteIdealism and monadism had been made by Lotze, and in both cases itremains an open question whether this is not pre-established harmonyin disguise. What is clear but usually overlooked is that Bradleyhimself saw Leibnizian monadism as the greatest challenge to his ownbrand of idealism: ‘Monadism’, he says, ‘on thewhole will increase and will add to the difficulties which alreadyexist’ (Appearance, p. 102). He was surely right inthis, as later British metaphysicians — such as James Ward,J.M.E. McTaggart, Herbert Wildon Carr, and Alfred North Whitehead— preferred Leibniz over Kant and Hegel as their main source ofinspiration.

In Bradley’s often rhapsodic descriptions of the Absolute, aconception of the world based both on his sceptical scrutiny of theinadequacies of philosophers’ accounts of judgment — and,it is clear, on a kind of personal experience of a higher unity whichin another context might have made him one of the world’srevered religious mystics —, we can see why, at the start ofthis article, his metaphysics was described as ‘a strikingcombination of the rational and the mystical’. The veryidiosyncrasy of this combination has meant that few subsequentphilosophers have been convinced by it. Nevertheless, in its bold anddirect confrontation of what he called ‘the great problem of therelation between Thought and Reality’, it stands in Westernphilosophy as a permanent and unsettling challenge to the capacity ofdiscursive thought to display the world without distortion; unsettlingbecause it arises, not from the imposition of an external standardwhich could be rejected as arbitrary or inappropriate, but from thedemand that our mechanisms of representation meet the standards theythemselves implicitly set.

Bibliography

Works by Bradley

• Ethical Studies, London: Oxford University Press, 1876;second edition, with notes: London: Oxford University Press,1927.
• The Principles of Logic, London: Oxford University Press,1883; second edition, revised, with commentary and terminal essays,London: Oxford University Press, 1922; corrected impression,1928.
• Appearance and Reality, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893;second edition, with an appendix, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1897;ninth impression, corrected, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930. Pagesreferences above are to the ninth impression.
• Essays on Truth and Reality, Oxford: Clarendon Press,1914.
• Aphorisms, Oxford: privately printed at the ClarendonPress, 1930.
• Collected Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935.
• Writings on Logic and Metaphysics, edited and withintroductions by James W. Allard and Guy Stock, Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1994.
• The Collected Works of F.H. Bradley, 12 volumes, editedand introduced by W.J. Mander and Carol A. Keene, Bristol: Thoemmes,1999.

The more recent of the editions produced in Bradley’s lifetimeare the ones now usually cited and the most useful: while the earliertext is left intact, Bradley’s later thoughts are added in theform of notes, appendices and essays, enabling the reader to trace thechanges in his ideas. (Such additional material is particularlyextensive in theLogic, where Bradley frequently defers toBosanquet’s criticisms of the first edition.)CollectedEssays contains the two pamphlets ‘The Presuppositions ofCritical History’ (1874) and ‘Mr Sidgwick’sHedonism’ (1877) as well as the valuable unfinished essay onrelations (1923–4) and a good bibliography. Between them, thisbook and the importantEssays on Truth and Reality containall his articles of any substance; these are the versions normallycited.Aphorisms, after many years out of print, appeared in1993 (bound together with ‘Presuppositions of CriticalHistory’ and an introduction by Guy Stock) in a facsimileedition (Bristol: Thoemmes Press). Bradley’s unpublished papers,notebooks and letters received are in the library of Merton College,Oxford. Correspondence between Bradley and Russell is in the RussellArchives at McMaster University; interesting extracts appear on pp.349–353 of Volume 6 ofThe Collected Papers of BertrandRussell (London: Routledge 1992). The John Rylands Library of theUniversity of Manchester has letters from Bradley to Samuel Alexander.Much previously unpublished material was made available in the 1999Collected Works. [In 2003 Thoemmes Press, the publisher oftheCollected Works, was acquired by the ContinuumInternational Publishing Group Ltd. The name of the imprint changedfrom “Thoemmes” to “Thoemmes Continuum”.]

Secondary Literature

• Allard, J.W., 2005,The Logical Foundations of Bradley’sMetaphysics: Judgment, Inference, and Truth, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.
• Ayer, A.J., 1946,Language, Truth and Logic, London:Victor Gollanz.
• Babushkina, D., 2016, ‘F.H. Bradley’s Conception ofthe Moral Self: A New Reading’, in W.J. Mander and S. Panagakou(eds.),British Idealism and the Concept of the Self,Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
• Baldwin, T., 1984, ‘Moore’s rejection ofidealism’, in R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner (eds.),Philosophy in History, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.
• Basile, P., 1999,Experience and Relations: An Examination ofF.H. Bradley’s Conception of Reality, Berne: PaulHaupt.
• –––, 2014, ‘Bradley’sMetaphysics’, in W. J. Mander (ed.),The Oxford Handbook ofBritish Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 189–208.
• Bradley, J., 1985, ‘The Critique of Pure Feeling: Bradley,Whitehead and the Anglo-Saxon Metaphysical Tradition’,Process Studies, 14(4): 253–64.
• –––, (ed.), 1996,Philosophy after F.H.Bradley, Bristol: Thoemmes.
• Broad, C.D., 1933,Examination of McTaggart’sPhilosophy (Vol. I), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Campbell, C.A., 1931,Scepticism and Construction:Bradley’s Sceptical Principle as the Basis of ConstructivePhilosophy, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
• Candlish, S., 1978, ‘Bradley on My Station and ItsDuties’,Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 56(2):155–70.
• –––, 1989, ‘The Truth about F.H.Bradley’,Mind, 98(391): 331–48.
• ––– 2007,The Russell/Bradley Dispute andits Significance for Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan; paperback edition 2009.
• Coady, C.A.J., 1992,Testimony, Oxford: ClarendonPress.
• Eliot, T.S., 1916,Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophyof F.H. Bradley, London: Faber, 1964.
• Ferreira, P., 1999,Bradley and the Structure ofKnowledge, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Gaskin, R., 1995, ‘Bradley’s Regress, the Copula andthe Unity of the Proposition’,The PhilosophicalQuarterly, 45(179): 161–80.
• Horstmann, R.P., 1984,Ontologie und Relationen,Koenigstein: Athenaeum.
• Hylton, P., 1990,Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence ofAnalytic Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Ingardia, R. (ed.), 1991,Bradley: A ResearchBibliography, Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy DocumentationCenter. [Warning: This volume contains many errors, mostly trivial;e.g., many of the articles attributed to Cresswell are byCrossley.]
• MacEwen, P. (ed.), 1996,Ethics, Metaphysics and Religion inthe Thought of F.H. Bradley, Lewiston, NY: The Edwin MellenPress.
• MacNiven, D., 1987,Bradley’s Moral Psychology,Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press.
• Mander, W., 1994,An Introduction to Bradley’sMetaphysics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 1995, ‘Bradley’s Philosophy ofReligion’,Religious Studies, 31(3):285–301.
• ––– (ed.), 1996,Perspectives on the Logicand Metaphysics of F.H. Bradley, Bristol: Thoemmes.
• –––, 2011,British Idealism. A History,Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• ––– (ed.), 2014,The Oxford Handbook ofBritish Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
• Manser, A., 1983,Bradley’s Logic, Oxford:Blackwell.
• Manser, A. and Stock, G. (eds.), 1984,The Philosophy of F.H.Bradley, Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprinted in paperback1986.
• McHenry, L.B., 1992,Whitehead and Bradley. A ComparativeAnalysis, Albany:, NY: State University of New York Press.
• Muirhead, J.H., 1925,Contemporary British Philosophy:Personal Statements, second series, London: George Allen andUnwin Ltd.
• Nicholson, P., 1990,The Political Philosophy of the BritishIdealists: Selected Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, ‘Study I’.
• Passmore, J., 1969, ‘Russell and Bradley’, in R. Brownand C.D. Rollins (eds.),Contemporary Philosophy inAustralia, London: George Allen and Unwin, pp. 21–30.
• Phemister, P., 2016, ‘Leibnizian Pluralism and BradleianMonism: A Question of Relations’,Studia Leibnitiana,45: 61–82.
• Russell, B., 1905, ‘On Denoting’,Mind,14(56): 479–93.
• Sprigge, Timothy, 1983,The Vindication of AbsoluteIdealism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• –––, 1993,James and Bradley: American Truthand British Reality, Chicago & La Salle, Illinois: OpenCourt.
• –––, 2010, ‘The Problem of Evil forAbsolute Idealism’, in J. Connelly and S. Panagakou (eds.),Anglo-American Idealism: Thinkers and Ideas,Oxford-Bern-Berlin: Peter Lang, pp. 165–180.
• Stock, G. (ed.), 1998,Appearance versus Reality, Oxford:Clarendon Press.
• Taylor, A.E., 1924–5, ‘Francis Herbert Bradley,1846–1924’,Proceedings of the British Academy,11(2): 458–468.
• Vallicella, V., 2002, ‘Relations, Monism and the Vindicationof Bradley’s Regress’,Dialectica, 56(1):3–35.
• Ward, J., 1925, ‘Bradley’s Doctrine ofExperience’,Mind, 34(133): 13–38. [This issue isa memorial volume; it also includes articles on Bradley by A.E.Taylor, G.F. Stout, G. Dawes Hicks and J.H. Muirhead.]
• Wollheim, R., 1956, ‘F.H. Bradley’, in Ayer, A.J. etal.,The Revolution in Philosophy, London: Macmillan, pp.12–25.
• –––, 1969,F.H. Bradley, Harmondsworth:Penguin, second edition.

From 1995 to 2004 (inclusive) there appeared a journal,BradleyStudies, which described itself as “aim[ing] to publishcritical and scholarly articles on philosophical issues arising fromBradley’s writings and from those of related authors [and] toinclude each year an ongoing list of what has been published onBradley and related themes.” In 2005, the journal wasamalgamated with another to formCollingwood and British IdealismStudies: incorporating Bradley Studies. Enquiries about backissues of the journal in its previous incarnation should be directedto its then EditorWilliam Mander.

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