We know that Bradley himself dismissed his 1874 essay The Presuppositions of Critical History as an inconsequential early work; but we also know that a later generation, Collingwood and Oakeshott especially, regarded this essay as truly revolutionary, in the words of Collingwood as a “Copernican revolution”. But it is still not generally recognised just how innovative, and destructive of older habits of thought, this short essay was.

The current revival of interest in Bradley has included a long-neglected aspect of his thought, namely his philosophy of history. There has been a new edition of The Presuppositions of Critical History with an introduction by Stock, a new essay by Rubinoff, and a recent number of Bradley Studies largely devoted to The Presuppositions of Critical History. All of these essays and articles related Bradley’s work to Collingwood’s, which has been the subject of an even bigger revival. Holdcroft made the (...) point that, though The Presuppositions often contains “embryonic versions of positions he developed in greater detail later”, he did not return to the subject of history ; this is, of course, true of his major works, and history ceased to be a major interest for him. However, on one occasion he was drawn back into the field. The occasion was one of the spats that he had with Bertrand Russell, who had taken over from Pragmatism as Bradley’s main concern, if three articles in Mind in 1909 and 1910 and new pieces prepared for publication in 1914 are anything to go by. These were reprinted or published for the first time as part of Essays on Truth and Reality. One of the new pieces, published as Chapter XIV, was entitled “What is the real Julius Caesar?”. He was responding to an article in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, xi, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description.”. (shrink)

Bradley’s philosophy of history, which was mostly embodied in his first published work, The Presuppositions of Critical History, has been the subject of a number of explanatory and critical pieces, several of them in the pages of this journal. In outlining the fundamentals of his approach to historical knowledge, therefore, I can be brief. He begins, ‘There is no history which in some respects is not more or less critical’, because selection of information is essential and the historian needs some (...) principle of selection. It is clear that Bradley includes selecting information not just from primary sources but from previous historians. And, ‘if we exclude or alter or rationalise to the very smallest extent then we have criticism at once.’ The criterion, or canon of selection has to be the historian himself. This has sometimes been dismissed as dangerously relativist, but such criticism misses the point that although the actual historian is the real criterion, ‘the historian as he ought to be’ is the ideal criterion; and ‘the historian who is true to the present is the historian as he ought to be.’ It is crucial to Bradley’s position and to the development of my argument in this paper to note that it is the historian who is true to the present, not to the past, who is the historian as he ought to be. For, as Bradley explained, ‘every man’s present standpoint ought to determine his belief in respect to all past events; but to no man do I dictate what his present standpoint ought to be. Consistency is the one word that I have emphasised.’ Bradley denied a correspondence theory of truth in favour of a coherence theory. Truth had to be constructed by the knower who was not a mere passive observer of reality.. (shrink)