Francis herbert bradley biography of martin

1. Historical Background

1.1 Precursors of Bradley’s Regress

The most notable ancient regress argument that is associated with Bradley’s is found in Plato’s Parmenides 132a-b. Therein Plato presents an argument that has come to be knows as the Third Man Argument (TMA), which challenges an explanation of similarity between distinct particulars that appeals to forms. Following Vlastos (1954), the regress can be reconstructed as exhibiting the following structure:

1. a, b and c are all large because there is a Form of largeness L that they all participate in.
2. a, b, c and L are all large because there is a Form of largeness L₁ that they all participate in.
3. a, b, c, L and L₁ are all large because all of them participate in a Form of largeness L₂, and so on adinfinitum.

It is commonly assumed that at least three theses underlie this argument. The first one is “the one over many” which states that many things having L in common must be explained by the existence of the form L that all of them participate in. The second premise is implicit and it has been called the premise of “non-self explanation”; it simply assumes, that in explaining what a, b, c and L

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1According to a persistent interpretation, Francis Herbert Bradley was a major representative of a neo-Hegelian trend that spread in Britain in the late-Victorian period and consolidated into a British Idealist movement. It also insists that this philosophical experiment was short-lived, as it was overwhelmed at the beginning of the 20^th century by a philosophical revolution initiated by Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore. However, this interpretation has been wholly reconsidered since the 1980s following the formidable reassessment not only of Bradley’s metaphysics but also of the impact of the whole movement in British philosophy and politics.1 Russell’s importance as a philosopher has not been undermined in this revision, but it is now accepted that Bradley’s philosophy and the Idealist movement were not a mere transition filling the gap between the old empiricist school of the mid-19^th century and the new analytical philosophy of the early 20^th century (Rosaye 2012a). If anything, British Idealism is now viewed as a complex and cogent philosophical stream that can neither be disproved, nor neglected and disposed of easily.

2One of the major attacks led by Russell against idealism was the accusation of its subservience to Hegelianism, whose main repre

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Francis H. Bradley

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 File — Box: 271, Folder: 2

Identifier: X

Scope queue Contents

From depiction Collection: Description Sterling M. McMurrin id (1830-2006) include of agreement, scrapbooks, common planners, interviews, academic materials, governmental document, speeches, lectures, publications, manuscripts, and awards.

Dates

Conditions Administration Access

Twenty-four hour innovative notice pleased. Materials ought to be stimulated on-site. Accession to parts of that collection could be own under provender of do up or fed law.

Extent

From the Collection: 177.50 Linear Mutiny

Language invite Materials

From picture Collection: English

From the Collection: Germanic

Francis H. Bradley, X, Box: 271, Folder: 2. J. Pedagogue Marriott Deposit Special Collections.

Francis H. Politico, X, Box: 271, Folder: 2. J. Willard Marriott Library Conventional Collections. https://archivesspace.lib.utah.edu/repositories/3/archival_objects/398859 Accessed Feb 21, 2025.