British Idealism

Classification

Period

c. 1865-1925 CE

Regions

Europe (origin)

Domains

Epistemology, Metaphysics

Overview

British Idealism is the movement that held that reality as a whole forms a single, all-encompassing rational system — the Absolute — whose character is ultimately mental or spiritual. For a generation it was the dominant academic philosophy in Britain. Josiah Royce developed a closely related absolute idealism in the United States, which this entry treats as a counterpart rather than as part of the British movement. Moore and Russell broke with it around 1900, and that break is where analytic philosophy begins.

Key figures

F. H. Bradley · T. H. Green · Bernard Bosanquet · J. M. E. McTaggart

Positions held

• Absolute Idealism
• Coherence Theory of Truth

  Joachim stated it in The Nature of Truth (1906); Bradley is usually counted with him, though one reading credits Bradley with an identity theory of truth instead.

  Question scope: The Nature of Truth

Influenced by

• German Idealism

  Stirling's The Secret of Hegel (1865) opened a sustained British reception of Hegel, from which Green, Bradley and Bosanquet built their own systems of the Absolute.

Later connections

• Analytic Philosophy Reacted to this tradition

  Moore and Russell rejected the doctrine of internal relations, on which a relation partly constitutes the terms it relates, and the coherence theory of truth that went with it. They argued instead that relations are external to their terms and that a true proposition can be analysed into independently real constituents rather than judged only by its coherence within a system of belief.

References

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Idealism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Idealism, §8 — Formation: the British movement developed in England, Scotland and Wales, especially at Oxford and Cambridge.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Coherence Theory of Truth, §2.1 'The Metaphysical Route to Coherentism'
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Coherence Theory of Truth, §2.1 'The Metaphysical Route to Coherentism' (a coherence theory was adopted by a number of British Idealists in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth; it notes Candlish's reading of Bradley as holding an identity theory)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Truth, §1.2 'The coherence theory' (the theory is associated with the British idealists to whom Moore and Russell were reacting, with Joachim 1906 as the example)
• H. H. Joachim, The Nature of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906): 'Truth in its essential nature is that systematic coherence which is the character of a significant whole'
• F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914)
• W. J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford University Press, 2011), ch. 1
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Idealism, §5 (British and American absolute idealism as a development of Hegel)
• Appearance and Reality — F. H. Bradley
• The Principle of Individuality and Value — Bernard Bosanquet