This book is a major contribution to the study of the philosopher F. H. Bradley, the most influential member of the nineteenth-century school of British Idealists. It offers a sustained interpretation of Bradley's Principles of Logic, explaining the problem of how it is possible for inferences to be both valid and yet have conclusions that contain new information. The author then describes how this solution provides a basis for Bradley's metaphysical view that reality is one interconnected experience and how this gives rise to a new problem of truth.
The book is a new edition of the 1883 version of Francis Herbert Bradleys Principles of Logic. Though annotations in the main text are minimal, a new introduction by William Moss places the work in context describing its early reception as well as its present-day importance. There can be no doubt that this text is pivotal for our understanding of the thought of the leading British idealist, and therefore of late nineteenth century philosophy in general. The author sketches in great detail his views in a large number of areas within logic, from the nature of universals and inference, to the laws and foundations of probabilities. The account makes use and criticism of the works on logic and related fields of his contemporaries, such as Sigwart, Lotze, Bain, and Venn. In his introduction, William Moss asks a few thought-provoking questions on Bradley's position and image in the tradition of analytic philosophy, focusing on whether indeed the traditionally held view that Bradley comes at the close of a period which is now very much behind us and of little use for philosophical activity today, is justified.
W. J. Mander presents a history of metaphysics in nineteenth-century Britain. The story focuses on the elaboration of, and differing reactions to, the concept of the unknowable or unconditioned, first developed by Sir William Hamilton in the 1829. The idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves may be seen as supplying a narrative arc that runs right through the metaphysical systems of the period in question. These thought schemes may be divided into three broad groups which were roughly consecutive in their emergence but also overlapping as they continued to develop. In the first instance there were the doctrines of the agnostics who developed further Hamilton's basic idea that fundamental reality lies for the great part beyond our cognitive reach. These philosophies were followed immediately by those of the empiricists and, in the last third of the century, the idealists: both of these schools of thought--albeit in profoundly different ways--reacted against the epistemic pessimism of the agnostics. Mander offers close textual readings of the main contributions to First Philosophy made by the key philosophers of the period (such as Hamilton, Mansel, Spencer, Mill, and Bradley) as well as some less well known figures (such as Bain, Clifford, Shadworth Hodgson, Ferrier, and John Grote). By presenting, interpreting, criticising, and connecting together their various contrasting ideas, this book explains how the three traditions developed and interacted with one another to comprise the history of metaphysics in Victorian Britain.
Readings in the History of Philosophy is organized chronologically; thus, each volume may be used independently as introductory, comparative, or reference material in a wide range of courses in philosophy and humanities. Taken together, these eight volumes form an integrated series that skillfully illustrates the contributions and influence of the major figures of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the present.
This volume covers the period from the beginning of Whitehead and Russell's work on Volume 2 of the Principles of Mathematics to the critical discovery of the theory of descriptions in 1905. Contains many previously unpublished manuscripts.
Venn's style is to take his readers very much into his confidence: as he builds the theory, he carefully points out the alternative paths he might have taken, the alternative definitions he might have used, he shows what the implications of these alternatives are, and justifies his choice on the broadest possible grounds. What is distinctive about this work may be given in part in Venn's own words: ``The thorough examination of symbolic logic as a whole, that is, in its relation to ordinary logic and ordinary thought and language; the establishment of every general symbolic expression and rule on purely logical principles, instead of looking mainly to its formal justification; and the invention and employment of a scheme of diagrammatic notation which shall be in true harmony with our generalizations.''
