Bradley, Francis Herbert(1846–1924)
The English idealist philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley was born in Clapham and educated at University College, Oxford; in 1870 he was elected to a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, terminable on marriage. Since he never married and the terms of the fellowship did not require him to teach, he was able to devote himself entirely to philosophical writing. His first published work was a pamphlet titled The Presuppositions of Critical History (Oxford, 1874). There followed Ethical Studies (London, 1876), Principles of Logic (London, 1883), and Appearance and Reality (London, 1893), as well as many articles in philosophical journals, some of which were published in Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford, 1914) and others in Collected Essays (Oxford, 1935).
Like Bernard Bosanquet, Bradley was influenced by T. H. Green. Like Bosanquet, too, he read and admired G. W. F. Hegel, but was less in sympathy with Hegelianism than Bosanquet was. Bosanquet was active in social reform, as Green had been, whereas Bradley was a Tory who hated liberalism and sometimes thought along the lines of Thomas Carlyle's later writings. Bradley was, and intended to be, a highly polemical writer. His Ethical Studies and Principles of Logic are a sustained attack on the utilitarianism and empiricism of John Stuart Mill and his followers and upon the positivist outlook of the times.
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