F H Bradley

Appearance and Reality (1893). By F H Bradley

Francis Herbert Bradley OM (30 January 1846 - 18 September 1924) was a British idealist philosopher. His most important work was Appearance and Reality (1893). Life: Bradley was born at Clapham, Surrey, England (now part of the Greater London area). He was the child of Charles Bradley, an evangelical preacher, and Emma Linton, Charles's second wife. A. C. Bradley was his brother. Educated at Cheltenham College and Marlborough College, he read, as a teenager, some of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In 1865, he entered the University College, Oxford. In 1870, he was elected to a fellowship at Oxford's Merton College where he remained until his death in 1924. Bradley is buried in Holywell Cemetery in Oxford. During his life, Bradley was a respected philosopher and was granted honorary degrees many times. He was the first British philosopher to be awarded the Order of Merit. His fellowship at Merton College did not carry any teaching assignments and thus he was free to continue to write. He was famous for his non-pluralistic approach to philosophy. His outlook saw a monistic unity, transcending divisions between logic, metaphysics and ethics. Consistently, his own view combined monism with absolute idealism. Although Bradley did not think of himself as a Hegelian philosopher, his own unique brand of philosophy was inspired by, and contained elements of, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectical method. John Henry Muirhead (28 April 1855 - 24 May 1940) was a British philosopher best known for having initiated the Muirhead Library of Philosophy in 1890. He became the first person named to the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham in 1900. Biography: Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Muirhead was educated at the Glasgow Academy (1866-70), and proceeded to Glasgow University, where he was deeply influenced by the Hegelianism of Edward Caird, the Professor of Moral Philosophy. He graduated MA in 1875. The same year he won a Snell exhibition at Balliol College, Oxford, to which he went up in Trinity Term 1875. His Library was originally published by Allen & Unwin and continued through to the 1970s. His Library is seen as a crucial landmark in the history of modern philosophy, publishing a number of prominent 20th Century philosophers including Ernest Albee, Brand Blanshard, Francis Herbert Bradley, Axel Hagerstrom, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Bernard Bosanquet, Irving Thalberg, Jr., Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore.