Francis Herbert Bradley

Bradley, Francis Herbert

 

Born Jan. 30, 1846, in Clapham; died Sept. 18, 1924, in Oxford. English idealistic philosopher and leader of English neo-Hegelianism.

Bradley was a graduate of Oxford University. His “absolute idealism” was an attempt to combine Hume’s skepticism with Hegel’s idealism and certain concepts of Kantian transcendentalism. Eliminating the concept of development from the Hegelian dialectical method and using formalistic logical principles as a point of departure, Bradley expressed his view of the dialectic as proof of the contradictoriness of the scientific understanding of the world in the work Appearance and Reality (1893; 2nd ed., 1969). He viewed the dialectical method as a means of breaking down sensory data to attain true “supraempirical” reality, which has a divine character.

WORKS

Ethical Studies. New York, 1951.
The Principles of Logic, vols. 1-2. London, 1928.
Essays on Truth and Reality. Oxford, 1914.

REFERENCES

Bogomolov, A. S. Anglo-amerikanskaia burzhuaznaia filosofüa epokhi imperializma. Moscow, 1964.
Metz, R. Die philosophischen Strömungen der Gegenwart in Grossbritannien, vol. 1. Leipzig, 1935.
Church, R. W. Bradley’s Dialectic. Ithaca, 1942.
Saxena, S. K. Studies of the Metaphysics of Bradley. New York, 1907.

IU. K. MEL’VIL’