This is the only general selection available of the writings of the renowned English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley; it is the ideal introduction to his thought. Bradley's original texts are given an editorial framework in the introductions to each section, allowing students to investigate his philosophy first-hand and yet to be guided through the difficulties presented by his work.

In his foreword to wilderness and the heart, a collection of essays on Henry Bugbee’s philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre commends Bugbee’s book, The Inward Morning, for the way in which it integrates form and content. How it is written and what it says, MacIntyre writes, “are to be grasped together or not at all” (xiii). “What can be learned from The Inward Morning,” MacIntyre continues, “is not primarily a set of philosophical theses and arguments—although such theses and arguments are to be (...) found in it—but rather something of the first importance about the place that philosophical theses and arguments might have in our lives, the relevance to our lived experience of the reading of philosophical texts” (xiii). In .. (shrink)

In his Autobiography John Stuart Mill said that his motivation in writing A System of Logic was to meet his opponents, those who held “the German or a priori view” of human knowledge, on their own terms. “The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience,” he continued, “is … in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions…. There never was such an instrument devised (...) for consecrating all deep seated prejudices.” To counteract “the German or a priori view” Mill argued that knowledge of mathematics and physical science is derived from observation and experience and that it presupposes no a priori or non-natural principles. It is comprised simply of truths known by direct experience and of truths inferred from them. Since mathematical and scientific knowledge is largely a body of inferred truths, A System of Logic is a study of the way in which truths are inferred. To quote Mill’s celebrated definition, logic is “the science of the operations of the understanding which are subservient to the estimation of evidence; both the process itself of advancing from known truths to unknown, and all other intellectual operations in so far as auxiliary to this.”. (shrink)

The appropriately chosen title of Volume 3 of Bradley’s Collected Works, Refinement and Revision, is a guide to its contents. A further guide as well as a useful outline is provided by Carol Keene’s carefully constructed table of contents. Here it is, slightly abbreviated, but with page numbers to indicate the amount of material.

Although T. H. Green is primarily remembered today as a moral and political philosopher, many of his philosophical concerns owe their origins to the Victorian crisis of faith in which a widespread belief in the literal truth of Scripture confronted seemingly incompatible scientific theories. Green attributed this crisis to the inability of science and religion to find accommodation in the popular version of empiricism widely accepted by educated men and women of his day. In his 371-page introduction to Hume’s Treatise, (...) Green argued that this philosophy was unacceptable, even on its own terms, and that it needed to be replaced with a new philosophy of life, one recognizing that both knowledge and human action are .. (shrink)

Despite periodic references to F. H. Bradley as a dogmatic metaphysician of the worst sort, or an unreformed, conservative, and nonhistorical Hegelian, one of his logical doctrines is now a commonplace: his analysis of the logical form of affirmative universal categorical statements. In “On Denoting” Russell adopted this analysis without discussion, merely noting that it had been “ably argued” by Bradley. Virtually all philosophers since have followed suit. It is now an accepted truth that statements like “All A’s are B” (...) have the logical form. (shrink)

In his Autobiography John Stuart Mill said that his motivation in writing A System of Logic was to meet his opponents, those who held “the German or a priori view” of human knowledge, on their own terms. “The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience,” he continued, “is … in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions…. There never was such an instrument devised (...) for consecrating all deep seated prejudices.” To counteract “the German or a priori view” Mill argued that knowledge of mathematics and physical science is derived from observation and experience and that it presupposes no a priori or non-natural principles. It is comprised simply of truths known by direct experience and of truths inferred from them. Since mathematical and scientific knowledge is largely a body of inferred truths, A System of Logic is a study of the way in which truths are inferred. To quote Mill’s celebrated definition, logic is “the science of the operations of the understanding which are subservient to the estimation of evidence; both the process itself of advancing from known truths to unknown, and all other intellectual operations in so far as auxiliary to this.”. (shrink)

The appropriately chosen title of Volume 3 of Bradley’s Collected Works, Refinement and Revision, is a guide to its contents. A further guide as well as a useful outline is provided by Carol Keene’s carefully constructed table of contents. Here it is, slightly abbreviated, but with page numbers to indicate the amount of material.

Henry Sidgwick reports two exchanges separated by a number of years with his old friend T. H. Green. Sidgwick says.

This paper reconstructs Sir William Hamilton's argument for thinking that the unconditioned is not an object of thought, a conclusion he abbreviates with the slogan ‘to think is to condition’. The paper describes Hamilton's conception of formal logic as the study of the laws of thought and claims that this conception allows these laws, particularly those of non-contradiction and excluded middle, to play a substantive role in Hamilton's argument.

The best introduction to Bradley is Richard Wollheim’s F. H. Bradley. Neither derogatory nor intensely partisan, Wollheim systematically addresses the central issues in Bradley’s philosophy, while in the process explaining and evaluating Bradley’s main arguments. One of the many merits of Wollheim’s book is that in it Bradley does not appear as a wild-eyed metaphysician, a modern Parmenides, but rather as a writer intent on separating logic from psychology. Wollheim continually stresses the importance of logic in Bradley’s thought and takes (...) pains to show that Bradley’s logical positions are frequently close to Russell’s. In this, as well as in other respects, Wollheim succeeds in presenting Bradley as a force to be reckoned with. (shrink)

The nine papers in this valuable collection were originally presented at a conference commemorating the centenary of the publication of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Although written independently, there is a reasonable unity of aim among them. The goal of each is to rethink issues in Bradley’s metaphysics and to relate them either to Russell or to ongoing debates in analytic philosophy or both. Even though most of the essays cover both topics, four of them are more concerned with Bradley and (...) Russell and five with Bradley and contemporary debates. (shrink)

Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War HIRATA Seiko IN ORDER FULLY TO UNDERSTAND the standpoint of Zen on the question of nationalism, one must first consider the ...

For many years there has been a debate about the role of the parietal lobe in the generation of behavior. Does it generate movement plans (intention) or choose objects in the environment for further processing? To answer this, we focus on the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), an area that has been shown to play independent roles in target selection for saccades and the generation of visual attention. Based on results from a variety of tasks, we propose that LIP acts as (...) a priority map in which objects are represented by activity proportional to their behavioral priority. We present evidence to show that the priority map combines bottom-up inputs like a rapid visual response with an array of top-down signals like a saccade plan. The spatial location representing the peak of the map is used by the oculomotor system to target saccades and by the visual system to guide visual attention. (shrink)

In this companion volume to The Universe Next Door, James W. Sire offers his refined definition of a worldview and addresses key questions about the history of worldview thinking, the existential and intellectual formation of worldviews, the public and private dimensions of worldviews and how worldview thinking can help us navigate an increasingly pluralistic universe.

Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric convergence model of public justification allows for the public justification of laws and policies based on a convergence of quite different and even publicly inaccessible reasons. The model is asymmetrical in the sense of identifying a broader range of reasons that may function as decisive defeaters of proposed laws and policies. This paper raises several critical questions about the asymmetric convergence model and its central but ambiguous presumption against (...) coercion. By drawing on the theory of structural coercion, a main conclusion of the paper is that the asymmetric convergence model ultimately encounters the very incompleteness problems that its proponents often associate with more familiar consensus models of public justification. The paper also develops an alternative, Rawlsian-inspired account of public justification that includes elements of both convergence and consensus but not asymmetry. The Rawlsian model enables us to understand how democratic decisions may possess a degree of procedural, but still morally significant, liberal legitimacy under conditions of pluralism even when citizens fail to agree fully about either the premises of or conclusions to their political arguments. (shrink)

It is commonly asserted that “death is not a welfare issue” and this has been reflected in welfare legislation and policy in many countries. However, this creates a conflict for many who consider animal welfare to be an appropriate basis for decision-making in animal ethics but also consider that an animal’s death is ethically significant. To reconcile these viewpoints, this paper attempts to formulate an account of death as a welfare issue. Welfare issues are issues that refer to evaluations concerning (...) an animal’s interests. This includes evaluations that refer only to comparisons between the presence and absence of states, including positive states. This means that an animal’s death may be a welfare issue insofar as it leads to the exclusion of relevant positive states. This allows us to deny that death is necessarily not a welfare issue. (shrink)

This book provides a collection of some 400 passages on music from early Christian literature - New Testament to c. 450 AD - newly translated from the original Greek, Latin, and Syriac. As there are no musical sources of the period, music historians must rely upon remarks about music in literary sources to gain some knowledge of early Christian liturgical music. This volume makes a large and representative collection of the material conveniently available. The passages are arranged chronologically and regionally (...) in eleven chapters with brief commentary. An introduction sets out the major subjects and themes of the original source material. (shrink)

This fully revised and extended edition of James Nickel's classic study explains and defends the conception of human rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent human rights treaties. Combining philosophical, legal, and political approaches, Nickel addresses questions about what human rights are, what their content should be, and whether and how they can be justified.

The concept of reasonableness is essential to John Rawls’s political liberalism, and especially to its main ideas of public reason and liberal legitimacy. Yet the somewhat ambiguous account of reasonableness in Political Liberalism has led to concerns that the Rawlsian distinction between the reasonable and the unreasonable is arbitrary and ultimately indefensible. This paper attempts to advance a more convincing interpretation of reasonableness. I argue that the reasonable applies first to citizens, who then play an important role in determining which (...) comprehensive doctrines and political conceptions of justice are reasonable. In addition, while Rawls fails to specify explicitly the meaning of the reasonable in his standard of political justification (i.e. the liberal principle of legitimacy based on the criterion of reciprocity), I offer an interpretation of what it means for citizens to present reasonable claims and arguments to one another in public reason. (shrink)