Abstract

The papers in this collection were originally presented at a conference celebrating the centenary of the publication of Appearance and Reality. Although ranging over a number of topics, they tend to focus on a few central Bradleyan doctrines, thereby giving the volume a reasonable measure of unity. This is helped by the editor’s fine introduction, which demonstrates how each paper contributes to our understanding of Bradley’s solution to the main problem which motivated his metaphysical excursions, that of “the relation between thought and reality”. That this is a key to understanding Bradley’s philosophy is surely right, for in the appendix to the second edition of Appearance and Reality Bradley confessed that this was the issue over which he had agonized most, the assumptions with which he began having quickly led him to “the great problem of the relation of Thought to Reality”. A few paragraphs later he claims that Chapter XV, titled Thought and Reality, presents the main thesis of his book.