Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. by Anthony Manser and Guy Stock
Review by: Panayot Butchvarov
Source: Noûs , Sep., 1986, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 435-437
Published by: Wiley

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2215310

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 MANSER & STOCK'S BRADLEY 435

Anthony Manser and Guy Stock, editors, The

Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1984), 321 pages, $34.50

PANAYOT BUTCHVAROV

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

This collection of sixteen essays is a welcome sign of new interest in F.

H. Bradley, a major philosopher neglected for decades because of the whims
of philosophical fashion. The essays fall, broadly speaking, into two groups:
those genuinely concerned with Bradley's philosophy, and those mainly
exploring similarities, in this reviewer's opinion generally superficial, be-
tween contemporary philosophical preoccupations and Bradley's views. In
the space available, I can only indicate what a reader may expect to find
in the book.
The editors' introduction is largely a comparison of Bradley with Quine
and the early Wittgenstein. W. H. Walsh's essay examines Bradley's
philosophy of history in his first publication, The Presupposition of Critical
History, and suggests that in it, by holding that historical facts are "con-
structions," Bradley anticipates the positions of Collingwood, Oakeshott,
and Leon Goldstein. Four essays, by David Bell, Crispin Wright, Peter
Johnson, and Peter P. Nicholson, are concerned with Bradley's ethics and
political philosophy. Bell discusses Bradley's attack on utilitarianism and
suggests that in part it anticipates "Bernard Williams's charge against
utilitarianism that it fails to pick up very much of the world's moral
baggage" (p.58). Crispin Wright discusses Bradley's notion of a society
as a moral organism. Can the individual member of the society be ihought
of as an organ of it? Only if the society as a whole has a telos; we can
say that to function as a kidney is to play a certain part in the promotion
of a telos of the whole organism, presumably healthy life, but not if the
telos could not be understood independently of the proper functioning of
the organs. Yet, Wright points out, Bradley held that the telos of the social
organism is the self-realization of the persons who constitute it.
Peter Johnson defends the retributive theory of punishment against
Bradley's criticism of it. Peter P. Nicholson argues that, whatever Bradley's
political views may have been (there is evidence that they were conser-
vative), conservatism could not have been part of his political philosophy,
since in Bradley's view the business of ethics and political philosophy is
to describe and explain the facts of morality and politics, not to favor
some of them at the expense of others.
Guy Stock compares Bradley's theory of judgment with Wittgenstein's,
Frege's, and Russell's, and then tries to state it in the idioms of contem-
porary predicate logic. Anthony Manser also compares Bradley with Frege;
he makes, in passing, the interesting suggestion that there is a similarity
between Bradley's view that the correct form of a judgment is "Reality
is such that S-P", rather than simply "S-P," and Frege's view that the

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 436 NOUS

reference of a sentence is the True or the False. T.L.S. Sprigge offers

a comparison between Bradley's and Husserl's views on the relationship
between the self and the world. And James Bradley provides a scholarly
account of the historical context in which Bradley's metaphysics, in par-
ticular his theory of immediate experience or feeling, was developed.
Simon Blackburn defends an interesting version of the coherence theory
of truth, but makes only a passing reference to Bradley. David Holdcroft
also writes on the coherence theory of truth but does pay attention to
Bradley. He notes Bradley's assertion that "it is impossible . . . to deal
with truth apart from an examination of the nature of reality." But while
the most general features of ultimate reality (e.g., that it is one) are
accessible to thought, its detailed nature is not. So the author suggests
that "perhaps the proper conclusion is that Bradley's metaphysics leads
to scepticism, and not to the conclusion that coherence is the criterion
of truth" (p.196).
Brand Blanshard discusses Bradley's views on relations, especially his
well-known argument that the category of relations is unintelligible because
for a relation to relate two distinct things it must itself be related to each
of them by another relation, and so on ad infinitum. Blanshard thinks
that this argument can be met by simply saying that a relation "is not
the same sort of being as its terms. It is neither a thing nor a quality.
It is a relation, and the business of a relation is to relate" (p.215). The
"business" of a quality, we might also say, is to qualify, but acknowledg-
ing this does not constitute understanding what it is for a quality to be
a quality of a certain individual thing. This topic, unlike that of relations,
has constituted the heart of the subject matter of traditional metaphysics
for twenty-five centuries and has aroused continuing puzzlement and con-
troversy. That relations are even more puzzling Blanshard himself admits
at the beginning of his essay when he points out that even when they
relate objects of sense they themselves are not objects of sense, yet usually
also are not in such cases objects of the intellect (p.211). With respect
to both topics, the philosophical challenge is how to understand what of
course are facts. If we should conclude, as Bradley did, that genuine
understanding of the facts in question is not possible, then the only con-
clusion to be reached is exactly his: that they are unintelligible.
J. N. Findlay, James Allard, and Stewart Candlish take Bradley's
metaphysics more seriously. Findlay describes it as a contribution to what
he calls Absolute-theory. The essay is difficult but profound. An Absolute
is "something whose being and essence are wholly self-explanatory, and
neither permit nor need any external explanation, and whose being and
essence are likewise totally explanatory of the existence and properties of
anything other than the entity in question" (p.269). Findlay places Bradley
squarely in the line of other great "exponents of Absolute-theory," men-
tioning Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Aquinas, Spinoza, Whitehead.
James Allard attempts, with erudition and philosophical acumen, to
explain Bradley's "principle of sufficient reason," his view that every true
judgment is necessarily true. For Bradley (in The Principles of Logic) a judg-
ment is true if it corresponds with a fact. A fact is the given. But the

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 NICHOLSON'S SEEING AND READING 437

given is not a set of discrete elements. It is "a continuous mass of percep-

tion and feeling." But then, it seems, virtually no judgment can corres-
pond to a fact, i.e., be true. This is so, however, only if we think that
a judgment such as "This tree is green" has a subject-predicate logical
form. In fact it is a conditional, more properly expressed as "Given pre-
sent conditions, this tree is green." This is why the judgment is about
the whole of the given. Indeed, more precisely, it is an abbreviated argu-
ment. It is true if the argument is sound. The relationship between the
premise and conclusion must therefore be logical, though not formal, and
this can be so only if finally the judgment is understood as asserting that
reality has a character such that if the premise is true then necessarily
the conclusion is also true. This is why all true judgments are necessarily
true, and when understood as conditionals they must be understood as
supporting counterfactuals.
But according to Bradley's metaphysics (e.g., in Appearance and Reality)
we can have no understanding of such a character of reality, as Stewart
Candlish masterfully explains in his essay. Truth is what satisfies the in-
tellect. One arrives at truth only if one's propositions express implica-
tions, that is, necessary connections, and form a system as comprehensive
as possible. Our intellect is not content to rest in mere contingency.
Candlish correctly points out that our actual practice of intellectual in-
quiry, e.g., in the empirical sciences, rests on this conviction, insofar as
it aims at explanation and understanding. But Bradley holds that no
understanding is possible as long as we think with the categories of in-
dividuals, qualities, and relations, since these categories do not allow us
to satisfy the demand for necessary connections between diverse things.
The chief lesson to be learned from Bradley, I suggest, is that we
should view our familiar philosophical categories (individuals, properties,
relations, and more recently states of affairs and possible worlds) with deep
suspicion, and therefore to subject the concepts of predication, identity,
and existence on which they rest to careful scrutiny. We could not do
so with clarity and precision, since we would be questioning our canons
of clarity and precision. It is not surprising therefore that Bradley's works
are difficult and obscure. Nor is this something to deplore.

Graeme Nicholson, Seeing and Reading (Atlantic

Highlands: Humanities Press, 1984), 275 pp., (cloth),
$25.00
WILLIAM F. VALLICELLA

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

The central theme of this book is "the connection between seeing and
reading." (p.2) The author finds the connection in the notion of inter-

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