Table Of ContentThe Russell/Bradley Dispute and its Significance for
Twen tieth -Cen tury Philosophy
The Russell/Bradley
Dispute and its
Significance for Twentieth
Century Philosophy
Stewart Candlish
palgrave
macmillan
© Stewart Candlish 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-50685-5
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Candlish Stewart.
The Russell/Bradley dispute and its significance for twentieth-century
philosophy I Stewart Candlish.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references (p. #) and index.
1. Russell, Bertrand, 1872-1970. 2. Bradley, F.H. (Francis Herbert),
1846--1924. 3. Analysis (Philosophy)-History-20th century. 4. Idealism
History-20th century. I. Title.
B1649.R94C37 2006
192-dc22 2006044842
Transferred to Digital Printing 2009
'For this is what disputes between Idealists, Solipsists and Realists look
like. The one party attack the normal form of expression as if they were
attacking a statement; the others defend it, as if they were stating facts
recognized by every reasonable human being.'
-Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §402
'The basic colours of history are not black and white, their basic
pattern not the contrast of a chess-board; the basic colour of history is
grey, in endless variations.'
Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866-1918,
2 vols (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990-92); vol. ii, p. 905;
the translation is presumably that of Ian Kershaw,
who quotes the remark in the first volume of
his biography of Hitler
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xix
1 The Stereotypical Picture of the Russell/Bradley Dispute 1
The protagonists 1
Locating the dispute 3
The stereotypical picture outlined 4
The sources and pervasiveness of the stereotype 6
Displacing the stereotype 18
2 Finding a Way into Bradley's Metaphysics 21
Preliminary sketch 21
The foundations of Bradley's thought 24
Intellectual satisfaction 26
Ideal experiment 27
The sceptical principle, mark I 33
The attack on predication 37
The attack on external relations 39
The sceptical principle, marks II and III 40
The attack on internal relations 42
To monism and idealism 44
Contingency, sufficient reason and circularity 46
3 Judgment 49
Introduction 49
An initial contrast between Bradley and Russell on judgment 50
Russell's 1903 binary relation theory of judgment 53
The origins of the multiple relation theory of judgment 58
The 1910 version 62
The 1912 version 67
The 1913 version 69
The 1918 non-theory 73
Subsequent developments 75
4 Truth 78
Introduction 78
Bradley and the coherence theory of truth 79
vii
viii Contents
Bradley on coherence and correspondence 81
Russell and the correspondence theory of truth 85
The derivation of Bradley's metaphysical theory of truth 89
The nature of Bradley's metaphysical theory of truth 93
The availability of the identity theory of truth 97
Russell and the identity theory of truth 100
Russell, the multiple relation theory, and correspondence 103
5 Grammar and Ontology 106
The transparency thesis, the theory of descriptions, and
the usual story 106
The consequences of replacing the usual story 111
Grammar, descriptions and analysis 115
Negative propositions 120
Universal propositions 124
Subject-predicate grammar and the status of relations 128
Subject-predicate grammar: substance and attribute 136
Coda 140
6 Relations 141
The significance of relations 141
Logic, metaphysics and internal relations 145
Interpreting the doctrine of internal relations 150
The development of Bradley's views on relations 155
Russell, internality and unreality 163
Bradley's arguments for the unreality of relations and
their terms 167
7 Decline and Fall 174
Health warning 174
The decline of monistic idealism 174
Conclusion 184
Notes 189
Bibliography 215
Bibliographical Note 225
Index 227
Preface and Acknowledgments
A distinguished philosopher of the present day, whose name would be
immediately recognized by most of the likely readers of this Preface and
who is to my knowledge extremely well-acquainted with the work of
Russell, said to me a few years ago after hearing a talk on Bradley and
Russell, 'That was most interesting. I had always thought that Bradley
was a lot of nonsense.' In the later years of his career, the Russell scholar
Leonard Linsky made in print a comparable, though more discreetly
phrased, admission (Linsky 1992, p. 247n).
How is it possible for Russell experts to be so ignorant of Bradley,
when Bradley, the major figure in British Idealism, loomed so large for
Russell himself, and the dispute between them formed one of the major
turning points in twentieth-century philosophy?
Part of the answer to this question lies in Russell's eventual success in
this dispute: the picture which he, together with G.E. Moore, drew of
Bradley for the purpose of controversy and polemic, was so far absorbed
by generations of subsequent philosophers that it became impossible to
see him as worth the trouble spent on his refutation. Observing the past
from this perspective is like looking through the wrong end of a tele
scope with a charcoal-tinted lens and finding only the Dark Ages, curi
ously diminished.
In this book I try to turn the telescope around, substitute a lens as far
as possible free of all tinting (especially the rosy) and re-examine this
significant episode in the recent history of philosophy. Although, as we
shall see, characterizing it in this way is already to enter into contro
versy, at this point we can think of the dispute as that between the
British Idealists and the founders of the movement which eventually
became known as 'analytic philosophy'.
One understandable reaction at this pOint, especially given recent
interest in Russell's move away from Idealism, would be to wonder
whether the job had already been done.1 A brief description of how I
have approached these matters should make clear that what I am
attempting here is unusual:
1 I have focused on both philosophers, and have given Bradley at least
as much attention as Russell (indeed, Chapters 2 to 6 of this book
alternate in taking one philosopher or the other as their protagonist).
ix
