Blackwell Reference Online

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Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924 ce ) was the chief representative of the philosophical movement known as British Idealism, which, influenced by kant and hegel , came to prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He made influential contributions in both ethics and logic, but it was for his original metaphysical system that he was best known. He followed the founding figures of the movement, T. H. Green and Edward Caird, in drawing the lesson from Kant and Hegel that there could be nothing out of all relation to any knowledge and thus that ultimate reality needs to be understood in mental terms, but he disagreed with them in thinking that reality was much more than just a system of thoughts or ideas. Preferring instead the term “experience,” he widened his grasp to include the entire evolving diversity of mental life. The evolution of this life he presents in three distinct levels or stages: immediate experience, relational experience, and absolute experience. The basic state in which reality is given or encountered, called by Bradley “feeling” or “immediate experience,” forms the first level. That it is our only point of contact with reality reveals the empiricist affinities of his system, but these have not always been recognized by his critics, since he goes further than other empiricists in his attempt to free the data that come from experience of ... log in or subscribe to read full text