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Bradley's Theory of Judgement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

M. J. Cresswell*
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington

Extract

This paper is a study of the theory of judgement and truth found in the works of F. H. Bradley. Although Bradley's thought underwent some changes during the forty years he wrote on these topics there seems to be only one change, viz. his abandonment of the so-called 'floating ideas' which is of any significance.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1979

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References

1 Bradley's works will be referred to by letter as follows: (PL) The Principles of Logic (1883), second edition with commentary and terminal essays (1922). corrected 1928; (AR) Appearance and REality (1893), second edition with an appendix (1897), ninth impression, corrected (1930); (ETR) Essays on Truth and Reality (1914). All page references are to the latest edition in each case. This means, e.g. that a reference to material in pp. 597 - 728 of PL will be to material written not long before 1922 and therefore later than material in AR and ETR, while the main text of PL was written considerably earlier than those works. I have taken the liberty (or perhaps assumed the arrogance) of referring by RE to my Reality as Experience in F. H. Bradley in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy 55 (1977), pp. 169-88. I would suggest that readers of the present article who itend reading RE should do so first.

2 A good account of this theory and pf Bradley's reaction to it is found in Chapter one of Richard Wollheim, F. H. Bradley (1959) pp. 18-43.

3 My discussion of the Absolute on pp. 184f. of RE is defective in that it makes no mention of the fact that it is an experience in which the judgement and the content of the judgement are identical. In this it is different both from the bottom level of immediate experience (in which there is no judgement) and the second level (in which the judgement that pis distinct from p).

4 What follows can be regarded as a fuller, and more accurate, spelling out of the points made in RE, pp. 185-88.

5 Wollheim, loc. cit.