Francis herbert bradley biography sampler

Universals are thus essential to inference, and for this reason Hume's account of inference in terms of the association of ideas collapses: Humean ideas are particulars, fleeting episodes which cannot be revived by association. Bradley seems here to be following the Humean idea that there are no logical relations between distinct existences: the reason that valid inference can be reflected in reality is that it can never take one beyond the original subject matter.

Much of The Principles of Logic is polemical, and it affords occasional examples of Bradley at his funniest and most acerbic, such as this note to a short chapter criticizing Herbert Spencer's view of the nature of inference Bk II, Pt II, Ch. It is clear that much of Bradley's criticism of his predecessors and contemporaries expresses his hostility to the sort of psychological atomism evident in extreme form in Hume but equally to be found presupposed in accounts of judgment like those mentioned above.

What Bradley particularly objected to about such views is that the particulars ideas which they treated as realities in their own right, and out of which judgments are said to be composed, are anything but: far from being themselves genuine individuals, they are abstractions from the continuous whole of psychological life and incapable of independent existence.

This is an early version of a holism which has since had many adherents. Thus the objections which Bradley deployed against misleading accounts of logic now begin to pose a threat against logic itself by eroding the integrity of the judgments which go into its inferences, and he ends Principles in a sceptical vein by suggesting that no judgment is ever really true nor any inference fully valid.

In addition to his discussion of the nature of ideas, judgment and reference, the emphasis he gives to the notion of truth is another main way in which he helped shaping the agenda of later analytic philosophy. At this point Bradley's attempt to write a book on logic without getting entangled in metaphysics begins to succumb to his doubts about the notion of truth.

It could hardly be clearer that Bradley holds an identity theory of truth, and although he is commonly believed to have been a supporter of a coherence theory of truth and is standardly identified as such in the textbooks , this common belief is at the very least greatly misleading. IV, sec. After the completion of The Principles of Logic , Bradley turned to the task of giving a full account of his metaphysics.

The result was Appearance and Reality But Bradley was philosophically active for a further thirty years thereafter, continuing to elucidate, defend and refine his views, and engaging with critics and rivals notably, and revealingly for both sides, with Russell. Concentration upon Appearance and Reality alone, therefore, risks placing undue weight upon what turn out to be temporary features of thought or expression, and this has in fact contributed to the distorted impressions of his thinking so often to be found in the textbooks of analytic philosophy.

Appearance and Reality is divided into two books. Some of these ideas belong especially to philosophy, such as the view that only the primary qualities are real and the Kantian notion of a thing-in-itself; others, for instance the notions of cause, motion, self, space, thing and time, are deployed in everyday life. A large proportion of his discussion is devoted to consideration of natural objections to this positive account.

Much of Book I involves presentation of familiar suggestions which make only part of Bradley's case: he alleges, for example, that motion involves paradoxes, and that primary qualities alone cannot give us reality, for they are inconceivable without secondary qualities, and that the notion of the thing-in-itself is self-contradictory, for if we really know nothing about it, then not even that it exists.

In generalized form, Bradley's contention is that relations such as greater than are unintelligible either with or without terms, and, likewise, terms unintelligible either with or without relations. Bradley himself says of the arguments he wields in support of this contention p. It is clear that his views on relations are both highly controversial and central to his thought.

In view of this, it would appear a serious tactical error on Bradley's part to present his arguments so sketchily and unconvincingly that even sympathetic commentators have not found it easy to defend him, while C. In spite of Bradley's laconic style, however, the exegetical errors of his critics are hard to justify. Further, Bradley does uniformly reject the reality of external relations, and it is easy, though not logically inevitable, to interpret this as a commitment to the doctrine of internality.

Bradley's treatment of relations originates in Chapter II with a discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual thing. How can we make sense of the fact that a single thing, such as, say, a lump of sugar, is capable of holding a plurality of different properties into a unity, such as its sweetness, whiteness and hardness?

We cannot postulate the existence of an underlying substance distinct from its qualities, for this would commit us to the existence of a naked, bare particular, the absurd conception of a something devoid of all qualities.

Francis herbert bradley biography sampler

Moreover, the original difficulty as to the unity of the thing is left unsolved by this move, since it becomes possible to ask what it is that binds the qualities to their substance. The alternative is to conceive the thing as a collection of qualities, yet what is the nature of the ontological tie that binds them into the unity of the thing? We are left with an aggregate of independent, substance-like qualities, rather than with an individual thing.

At this point, the problem of relations emerges in its full ontological significance, for it now looks as if only a relation could provide the required nexus. Bradley's considered view in Chapter III is that neither external nor internal relations possess unifying power and must therefore be rejected as unreal. This is the proper conclusion of a set of condensed arguments which he deploys as a team, systematically excluding the possible positions available to those who would disagree.

Once this is recognized, Bradley goes on to argue, one sees that a related term A is really made up of two parts, one functioning as the foundation of the relation, A1 , and the other determined by it, A2. Thus, each related term turns out to be a relational complex, in this specific case, A turning out to be the complex R A1,A2. This launches a regress, for by the same logic A1 and A2 will have to be made up of two distinct parts, and so on without end.

The member of Bradley's team of arguments which has attracted the greatest polemical attention, however, is the one which alleges that if a relation were a further kind of real thing along with its terms as, e. On this understanding, to deny the reality of relations is to deny that they are independent existents. It is this argument which explains reactions like Broad's: in common with others, he took Bradley to be assuming that relations are a kind of object, when what Bradley was doing was arguing by a kind of reductio against that very assumption.

And indeed, he does not wish to deny the obvious fact that we experience a rich diversity of things; relations and plurality in some sense exist, and therefore belong to reality. The denial of the reality of relations does not imply their absolute non-existence; rather, his conclusion is that relations and terms should be conceived as aspects within an all-embracing whole.

As against Russell, Bradley was wholly explicit on this fundamental point:. The implications of Bradley's treatment of relations are not solely metaphysical; they are also epistemological. Some have thought that the denial of the reality of relations amounts to the assertion that all relational judgments are false, so that it is, for example, not true that 7 is greater than 3 or that hydrogen is lighter than oxygen.

Such an interpretation is made credible by Bradley's account of truth, for on that account no ordinary judgment is ever perfectly true; in consequence, to one who reads him under the influence of the later but anachronistic assumption that truth is two-valued, his claim appears to be that relational judgments are all false. On Bradley's account of truth, however, while for ordinary purposes it is true that 7 is greater than 3 and false that oxygen is lighter than hydrogen, once we try to meet the more exacting demands of metaphysics we are forced to recognize that truth admits degrees and that, while the former is undoubtedly more true than the latter, it is not fully true.

The imperfection of even the more true of these judgments, though, is nothing to do with the its being relational rather than predicative. A perfect truth, one completely faithful to reality, would thus have to be one which did not abstract from reality at all; and this means that it would have to be identical with the whole of reality and accordingly no longer even a judgment.

The final truth about reality is, on Bradley's view, quite literally and in principle inexpressible. Bradley, with McTaggart, is normally taken to be the principal figure in British idealism: a movement that now seems peculiar for the speed of its total downfall. But its influence lasted longer than that, starting with the earlier work of Green.

Bradley scarcely mentioned his pluralist critics. Bradley was a remarkable writer: powerful, allusive and scornful, and wholly undeserving of the charges of woolly unclarity brought against him by his later positivist critics. Interests Ethics; logic; metaphysics. Caird, Bosanquet and Hegel. Back to Profile. Photos Works. Main Photo.

Francis Bradley. School period Add photo. Career Add photo. Achievements Add photo. Membership Add photo. Moreover, the child at this stage lacks the higher-order consciousness needed to see itself as realizing itself by attaining an ideal object with which it has identified its satisfaction. At this early stage the child desires the object only when it is present; at a later stage the child will gain a sense of these things as independent external objects that persist, ceteris paribus, and so can be desired in their absence.

The child also experiences other people and is eventually going to recognize them as individuals with independent wills—i. Since initially these others are going to be family members or care-givers there will be a pre-conscious bond of affection between them and the child. When the child acts in accord with the will of another, pleasure results from the affirmation from that other person, while opposition is experienced as painful because it negates the bond of affection.

This produces the felt tension similar to that which occurs in the case of an inaccessible desired object: a tension between the pleasure associated with the presence of the care-giver and the pain of being without the approval of that person. The main point here is that the child will tend to be good i. As the child develops it learns the language of morality and thereby the moral perspective embedded in it.

In this process the child learns the meaning of normative concepts and in doing so learns what they mean to others in the shared linguistic community. In this way the social community imparts a moral perspective. In fact, the community introduces the child to two levels of moral reflection: it imparts specific moral values and norms through its institutions and practices, and; it provides the moral concepts that are necessary to the task of conceiving of ways to improve society, in this way making possible the move to the more comprehensive level of Ideal Morality.

It is also important to note the roles he assigns to pleasure and pain. That these have a place in his moral theory indicates that the ethical hedonists were not totally wrong about their importance, their mistake being to think that promoting pleasure and diminishing pain marks the ultimate goal of moral activity. By contrast, Bradley argues that in acting morally we choose and will and act in terms of the idea of a state of affairs which represents a superior self to be realized.

We feel pleasure at the thought of that self with which we have identified because we feel affirmed by the thought of its realization. We feel pain at the felt contradiction between this and our actual self and pain at the thought of not being the superior self we desire. He traces the transitions from a very primitive state of mental life through to the sort of consciousness exhibited by a mature moral agent.

From primitive appetites which involve a precursor self that affirms itself through its desires we arrive at a variety of types of actions and of objects of volition and different relations between the self and the objects. Children move from the simple desire to possess the object to the pleasure taken in the approval of others, to self-conscious moral action and its pleasures.

These stages also reveal the development of feelings and emotions and an increasing range of types of object that one might take pleasure in. In this process the self is developing its conception of itself and once it recognizes that its fate is tied to that of society we have a social self that does not see itself as being indifferent to the interests of others.

An important feature of this developmental process is gaining knowledge of good and bad and the capacity to will both. The need for this arises, first, at the formal level of the structure of volitional action, which entails the dualism of inferior and superior selves or conceptions of these. To get beyond formal necessary conditions to an account of specific actions this formal structure has to be filled in with some determinate content which explains what the nature of these two selves is.

At the level of social morality this may involve no more than knowledge of what society demands of me—which I will identify as the superior, good self I should be—alongside my tendencies to go my own way which marks the bad self that opposes the social norms. But there must be more than mere knowledge, for it is also necessary, psychologically, that we actually feel the tension produced by the conflicting tendencies to be both good and bad.

It is not simply that one fails to comprehend fully the nature of moral action without this, but that we also cannot feel the contradictions that will move us to action, and without action there is no morality. Hence, the common notion that moral agents are often viewed as having to expend a great deal of effort on the internal struggle between the desire to be good and a propensity to do things known to be bad is correct.

In this way moral conflicts are always internal struggles. In acting morally I aim at realizing my good self, which I see as my true self. Unfortunately, this also marks the final tension that renders morality a self-contradiction. Morality really seeks its own demise for were the ideal self realized there would be nothing that remains to be actualized, at which point morality is at an end.

Indeed, some writers think we can pass beyond morality into the sphere of religion. One advantage of this is that we might find an ideal moral type—say the Jesus of Christianity - which provides an example of the ideal self we should be aiming at. In fact it could be claimed that in religion the self that is only ideal in morality is actual in the religious experience.

Thus, disharmony arises necessarily, and the moral self is not realized in religious experience. None of this should surprise us. It is the job of metaphysics to lay bare these hypotheses and show how they all fit together. Were the final picture put together we would have an absolute and finished view of reality. But attaining this comprehensive and coherent view is impossible because of the nature of thought, and so the role of the notion of the Absolute—a coherent, comprehensive conception of Reality—has the logic of a limiting case.

In morality we similarly seek an ideal self, one that is homogeneous coherent but also fully specified comprehensive , but this is not attainable, as we have seen, thereby demonstrating that the notion of an ideal self that is an infinite whole also has the logic of a limiting case. It may guide our moral thinking and our practical reasoning, but it does not represent a condition anyone can achieve.

Once we recognize that the end is not attainable, that is the end of morality, and this is not a result of weakness on the part of moral agents but a result of the logical structure of volitional choice. Bradley never produced a book on political philosophy and the few published papers touching on social and political themes present views that do not diverge from the position he set out in Ethical Studies , in particular, in the fifth essay, My Station and its Duties.

From that text we can see that Bradley would have sided with the Twentieth Century communitarians who opposed the individualistic political theories of Rawls and Nozick see Kymlicka, Chapter 4. Bradley also recognized the importance of social nurturing and teaching that raise a human being from the level of its basic desires and impulses to the level at which she becomes, and is recognized as, a rational moral agent.

Social and political institutions are not created by atomic individuals out of some pre-social primordial material, and this marks the place that contract theories of the state go wrong. Their basic error is to think that talk of individuals abstracted from all social relations would have any meaning. This error is compounded by assuming that individuals are pure rational calculators without emotional attachments to others around them who enter into social cooperation only for personal gain.

Bradley and all the British Idealists thought that contract theories and individualistic approaches to social and political relations were grounding their political philosophies on false views of human nature and human society. In a word, their basic errors were mistakes in metaphysics. Although it is not a topic for this occasion, it would be of some interest to consider what his contemporaries had to say regarding the interplay of ethics and political theory.

Moreover, the student of this period in the history of British moral philosophy would also do well to compare the writings of Green, Bradley and Sidgwick. Taken together, these works provide important assessments of the writings of earlier moral theorists, such as Kant and J. Mill, as well interesting discussions of moral psychology, central moral concepts, and the role of moral theory.

These are all difficult and complex texts - which makes comparative studies of their views rather daunting. Aristotle Bradley, Francis Herbert childhood, the philosophy of consequentialism ethics: deontological free will Green, Thomas Hill hedonism intentionality Mill, John Stuart perfectionism, in moral and political philosophy Sidgwick, Henry.

The Structure of Volitional Choice 2. The Perfect, Ideal Self 3. The Content of Volitional Choices 4. The Psychology of Moral Development 5. The End of Morality 6. Bradley begins this task by noting the different aims we have in pursuing theoretical knowledge versus our aims in practical reasoning: What we want in theory is to understand the object; we want neither to remove nor alter the world of sensuous fact, but we want to get at the truth of it.

So long as our theory strikes on the mind as strange and alien, so long do we say we have not found truth; we feel the impulse to go beyond, we alter and alter our views, till we see them as a consistent whole. There we rest, because then we have found the nature of our own mind and the truth of the facts in one. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version.

In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. English philosopher — Clapham , England. Oxford , England. British Idealism epistemic coherentism [ 1 ]. Metaphysics ethics philosophy of history logic. Bradley's regress epistemic coherentism [ 1 ]. Life [ edit ]. Philosophy [ edit ]. Moral philosophy [ edit ].

Legacy [ edit ]. Books and publications [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. The Life of Bertrand Russell. ISBN