Abstract

When I moved from Oxford to Birkbeck College, London in 1954, I, like most of the younger philosophers in Oxford, knew little of Bradley’s philosophy. I was introduced to that by Ruth Saw, who gave me a copy of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Subsequently I lectured on Bradley, along with and by contrast with Russell, as part of a course on Epistemology and Metaphysics, for something like thirty years — indeed until the appearance of my Metaphysics in 1984, a work which incorporates in chapters 6, 7 and elsewhere what I had to say on Bradley. It became apparent to me early on that students found Bradley rather foreign to their philosophical concerns and that an exposition of his metaphysics and logic required some translation out of the Bradleian idiom. Bradley’s style of writing, let alone his style of argumentation, is not exactly transparent. Moreover, we had been taught that Russell, among others, introduced a revolution in philosophy, though it was evident on further examination that many of Russell’s metaphysical and epistemological concerns were very similar to those of Bradley, even if his conclusions were different. These latter facts required emphasis, but in the early years of my lectures there was little in the way of adequate commentary on Bradley. R.W. Church’s Bradley’s Dialectic, I used to say, was, if anything, more difficult than Bradley. The situation has now moved on. If only Mander’s book had been available during the period of my lectures! It would have been immensely useful, and it is more than welcome now.