Bradley

1846 – 1924

Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924) was the preeminent British Absolute Idealist of the late nineteenth century, whose rigorous critiques of empiricism, utilitarianism, and correspondence theories of truth shaped Anglo-American philosophy before and during the analytic turn. His metaphysics held that ordinary experience presents a self-contradictory 'Appearance' that points toward a unified, supra-relational 'Absolute.' In ethics, his early work mounted a sustained attack on hedonistic and Kantian moral theories in favor of a social, self-realization account.