Abstract

As is well-known, Bradley maintained the curious view that Reality was a single, self-consistent whole without individuable parts. He supported this view not by direct arguments but indirectly, by trying to show that alternative positions led to contradiction. Undoubtedly the most important among his reductio arguments were the battery of arguments he used against relations in an attempt to prove that, since relations were impossible, there could be no multiplicity of related items. For if there were two or more items, there would certainly be relations between them. The defects of these arguments are by now well-known. However, Bradley’s arguments against relations were only part of the case he made for monism. Another important part of his case concerns the arguments he brought against subject-predicate propositions. Bradley was concerned to argue not merely the now generally conceded view that not all propositions were subject-predicate in form, but the more radical thesis that there were no true subject-predicate propositions at all.