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Dialectics, logic, metaphysics
The benefit of hindsight provides a striking contrast between these works [...]. While both books eschew formal methods, in Frege's case this results merely from an attempt to give a readable account of some applications of mathematical logic. But the absence of formulae (theorems, axioms, rules of inference) from Bradley's book is intrinsic to it, expressing an opposition (shared by Mill) to the formalization of reasoning in principle, as detaching inference from the practical acquisition of scientific knowledge. This, together with the fact that familiar terms (e.g. ‘contradiction’) are used in unfamiliar ways, gives the book an archaic feel. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that Principles would no longer ordinarily be consulted by a modern logician unless for historical purposes, it focuses on issues central to logic, and the impression of its being backward-looking is to some extent misleading: for example, it uses the older vocabulary of ‘ideas’ and ‘judgments’ to express views which, often through their (selective) impact upon Russell, gave rise to doctrines subsequently expressed in terms of sentences and propositions; and it effectively exposed the notion of meaning to a sceptical scrutiny which has continued long since.
Traditionally, logic books came divided into three parts, dealing respectively with Conception (usually via ideas, the traditional components of judgments), Judgment and Inference. Bradley both inherits and transforms this tradition, keeping the three-part format but devoting the first to Judgment and both second and third parts to Inference, thus dropping the separate treatment of Conception. This is significant in that it reflects his rejection of the standard view that judgments are formed by somehow conjoining ideas: for example, the Port-Royal Logic's Aristotelian claim that they are ‘necessarily composed of three elements -- the subject-idea, the attribute, and the joining of these two ideas’. Bradley attacks such doctrines on more than one front.
He argues, for instance, that those who, like Hume, think judgments to consist of separable ideas, fail to identify the sense of ‘idea’ in which ideas are important to logic: ideas in this sense are not separate and datable psychological events (such as my now visualizing a rainbow) but abstract universals. Once ideas are properly understood, he suggests, they can no longer even plausibly be thought of as individual and mutually independent entities which can be put together to create a judgment (as Locke maintains in Chapter XIV of Book IV of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding): the order of dependence is the opposite, ideas being abstractions from complete judgments. Here, albeit in his archaic vocabulary, Bradley identifies in advance the difficulties which Russell was later to face in trying to reconcile the unity of the proposition with what he thought to be the mutual independence of its constituents, difficulties which appeared in another guise for Frege in his attempt to maintain a strict division between concepts and objects. (From Stanford E of Ph.)
Bradley's views on ethics were expressed at length in his first widely acknowledged publication, Ethical Studies (1876). [...]
Bradley says in his Preface that his object is ‘mainly critical’ and that the ethical theory of his time rests on ‘preconceptions metaphysical and psychological’, which are ‘confused or even false’. In this the most Hegelian of his books, his approach is, in a series of connected essays, to work dialectically through these erroneous theories towards a proper understanding of ethics. Accordingly he tells us that the essays ‘must be read in the order in which they stand’, and a corollary of this is that the common practice of extracting one or two of them (usually the brilliantly written ‘Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake’ and ‘My Station and Its Duties’) from the whole, on the basis of their individual merits, can result in a misleading impression of their significance within Bradley's moral thinking: neither represents some finished position. [...]
These theories are inadequate because they have a deficient conception of the self, a deficiency he begins to remedy in the fifth essay, the famous ‘My Station and Its Duties’, where he outlines a social conception of the self and of morality with such vigour that it is understandable that the mistaken idea that it expresses his own position has gained some currency. This Hegelian account of the moral life, in which the self is fully realized by fulfilling its role in the social organism which grounds its duties, is clearly one which greatly attracted Bradley, and he seems never to have noticed the implicit tension between the metaphysical account of the self as necessarily social and the moral injunction to realize the self in society. (From Stanford E of Ph.)
Steven Cahn (ed.), Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education (1997).
Murray Darling Basin Commission
Dictionaries, bilingual and multilingual
Coolcat Victorian libraries catalogue
Chris Wright's Revolutionary Reading Guide - A big list of sources, all the usual suspects and then some, thematically arranged by topics like: the critique of political economy, marxism and philosophy, working-class and revolutionary histories, historical origins of capitalism, global capital and Africa, Latin America etc.
johnstonia - Ian Johnston's page. Lots of texts classical and modern, in German and English. Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Malory, Darwin, Diderot, Nietzsche, Conrad, Kafka, etc.
Ostracised from Österreich[EN]"a voice from Vienna on life, politics, the universe"