F. H. Bradley

Francis Herbert Bradley ( born January 30, 1846 in Clapham, † September 18, 1924 in Oxford) was an English philosopher and prominent representative of the British idealism.

Life

He was born in Clapham, Surrey, England, the son of Charles Bradley, an evangelical preacher, and his second wife, Emma Linton. From 1865 to 1869 he studied at University College, Oxford University in England. He tried to overcome the separation between ethics, history, logic, epistemology, metaphysics and psychology. After several failed attempts to pursue an academic career, he eventually became a Fellow without Lecturer at Merton College, Oxford. This position he would hold until his death.

Teaching

Bradley et al thus known that it was first during the history of philosophy, the question " Why should I be moral? " in the text Why should I be moral? (In:. . Ethical Studies The Clarendon Press, Oxford 1876 ) raised. The text resolved in the 20th century to a still ongoing philosophical debate about the title question, which several times a title of books and book chapters in this framework.

The Bradley Quote " Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst" comes first in Part II of Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia.

The main work of Bradley's essay applies the appearance and reality ( 1893). This document served as the basis for Bradley's student Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, engage critically with the position taken by Bradley Hegelianism. Especially Whitehead recognized despite its fundamentally different solution in process and reality of the influence Bradleys. " Although I'm in the supporting part of the work in sharp contradiction to Bradley, the difference in effect is then not so great. [ ... ] His insistence on the, feeling ' [ feelings ] agrees exactly with our own conclusions. [ ... ] If one believes, as formulated here cosmology is meaningful, one naturally wonders if they dominant psychology not from the transfer of some of the main theories of absolute idealism is built on a realistic basis. " Bradley advocated a theory of experience, which is based on an ontological monism, that is, that all real can only be grasped as a unit. Access to the real world is immediate and can only be experienced feeling. Of objects, facts or events you can only speak by separating the detected unit in feeling in thinking. The thinking created a "machine of concepts and relations. " (AR, 28) The immediate experience, however, does not allow accurate representation of reality. The basic concepts for the understanding of the world such as substance, causality, relation or quantity each contain two contradictory opposite, but equally true judgments. This led Bradley to a fundamental epistemological skepticism.

Works

• Appearance and Reality ( 1893) (Engl. " Appearance and Reality " (1923 ) )
• "Principles of Logic" (1883 )
• Why should I be moral? In: Ethical Studies. The Clarendon Press, Oxford 1876.

• Collected Works. Thoemmes, Bristol, 1999, ISBN 1-85506-577-0 ( Nachdr d ed London 1876)