F. H. Bradley 1846 – 1924

Francis Herbert Bradley was an English philosopher and the leading representative of British absolute idealism. A fellow of Merton College, Oxford, he wrote almost in solitude, publishing Ethical Studies, the Principles of Logic, and his magnum opus Appearance and Reality, in which he argued that the world of finite relations is appearance and that ultimate reality is one all-encompassing experience. His system was the dominant force in late-nineteenth-century British philosophy and the principal target of the early analytic movement led by Russell and Moore.

Francis Herbert Bradley was born in 1846 at Clapham, the fourth of more than twenty children in the household of an Evangelical preacher; the literary critic A. C. Bradley was his younger brother. He went up to University College, Oxford in 1865, took a second in Greats in 1869, and in 1870 was elected to a fellowship at Merton College, which he held without teaching duties for the rest of his life because of severe and chronic ill health.

His major works are Ethical Studies (1876), the Principles of Logic (1883), Appearance and Reality (1893), Essays on Truth and Reality (1914), and the posthumously collected papers on logic, ethics, and history. Reclusive and combative on the page, he conducted his philosophy from the seclusion of his Merton rooms, dedicating Appearance and Reality 'to my wife' — a woman who has never been identified — and corresponding with few but his closest friends.

Bradley gave British absolute idealism its most influential form: the argument that ordinary categories such as relation, thing, time, and self generate contradiction when pressed, and that reality is one harmonious experience of which our appearances are partial expressions. He provoked the Russell-Moore revolt that founded analytic philosophy and remained for that movement the model of what was being rejected. Awarded the Order of Merit in 1924, he died at Oxford in the same year.