This book is a major contribution to the study of the philosopher F. H. Bradley, the most influential member of the nineteenth-century school of British Idealists. It offers a sustained interpretation of Bradley's Principles of Logic, explaining the problem of how it is possible for inferences to be both valid and yet have conclusions that contain new information. The author then describes how this solution provides a basis for Bradley's metaphysical view that reality is one interconnected experience and how this (...) gives rise to a new problem of truth. (shrink)

This is the only general selection available of the writings of the renowned English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley; it is the ideal introduction to his thought. Bradley's original texts are given an editorial framework in the introductions to each section, allowing students to investigate his philosophy first-hand and yet to be guided through the difficulties presented by his work.

The appropriately chosen title of Volume 3 of Bradley’s Collected Works, Refinement and Revision, is a guide to its contents. A further guide as well as a useful outline is provided by Carol Keene’s carefully constructed table of contents. Here it is, slightly abbreviated, but with page numbers to indicate the amount of material.

Henry Sidgwick reports two exchanges separated by a number of years with his old friend T. H. Green. Sidgwick says.

The best introduction to Bradley is Richard Wollheim’s F. H. Bradley. Neither derogatory nor intensely partisan, Wollheim systematically addresses the central issues in Bradley’s philosophy, while in the process explaining and evaluating Bradley’s main arguments. One of the many merits of Wollheim’s book is that in it Bradley does not appear as a wild-eyed metaphysician, a modern Parmenides, but rather as a writer intent on separating logic from psychology. Wollheim continually stresses the importance of logic in Bradley’s thought and takes (...) pains to show that Bradley’s logical positions are frequently close to Russell’s. In this, as well as in other respects, Wollheim succeeds in presenting Bradley as a force to be reckoned with. (shrink)

In his foreword to wilderness and the heart, a collection of essays on Henry Bugbee’s philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre commends Bugbee’s book, The Inward Morning, for the way in which it integrates form and content. How it is written and what it says, MacIntyre writes, “are to be grasped together or not at all” (xiii). “What can be learned from The Inward Morning,” MacIntyre continues, “is not primarily a set of philosophical theses and arguments—although such theses and arguments are to be (...) found in it—but rather something of the first importance about the place that philosophical theses and arguments might have in our lives, the relevance to our lived experience of the reading of philosophical texts” (xiii). In .. (shrink)

Despite periodic references to F. H. Bradley as a dogmatic metaphysician of the worst sort, or an unreformed, conservative, and nonhistorical Hegelian, one of his logical doctrines is now a commonplace: his analysis of the logical form of affirmative universal categorical statements. In “On Denoting” Russell adopted this analysis without discussion, merely noting that it had been “ably argued” by Bradley. Virtually all philosophers since have followed suit. It is now an accepted truth that statements like “All A’s are B” (...) have the logical form. (shrink)

Formal logic was subjected to numerous criticisms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and by the early nineteenth century was in serious decline in Britain. Its resurgence began when Edward Copleston defended it as useful for education in the liberal arts. His defense was continued by Richard Whately, whose Elements of Logic revived the study of logic in Britain. Although Whately gave the impression that he was merely restating Aristotle, he limited logic to the study of formal reasoning and provided (...) an account of logical form. This account was challenged by Sir William Hamilton who claimed that the quantifiers “all” and “some” attach to both the subjects and the predicates of propositions. Charitably interpreted, this enlarged formal logic by admitting valid, non-Aristotelian syllogisms, but instead of completing logic as Hamilton claimed, it opened the way for further developments. (shrink)

In his Autobiography John Stuart Mill said that his motivation in writing A System of Logic was to meet his opponents, those who held “the German or a priori view” of human knowledge, on their own terms. “The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience,” he continued, “is … in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions…. There never was such an instrument devised (...) for consecrating all deep seated prejudices.” To counteract “the German or a priori view” Mill argued that knowledge of mathematics and physical science is derived from observation and experience and that it presupposes no a priori or non-natural principles. It is comprised simply of truths known by direct experience and of truths inferred from them. Since mathematical and scientific knowledge is largely a body of inferred truths, A System of Logic is a study of the way in which truths are inferred. To quote Mill’s celebrated definition, logic is “the science of the operations of the understanding which are subservient to the estimation of evidence; both the process itself of advancing from known truths to unknown, and all other intellectual operations in so far as auxiliary to this.”. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Sir William Hamilton's argument for thinking that the unconditioned is not an object of thought, a conclusion he abbreviates with the slogan ‘to think is to condition’. The paper describes Hamilton's conception of formal logic as the study of the laws of thought and claims that this conception allows these laws, particularly those of non-contradiction and excluded middle, to play a substantive role in Hamilton's argument.

Although T. H. Green is primarily remembered today as a moral and political philosopher, many of his philosophical concerns owe their origins to the Victorian crisis of faith in which a widespread belief in the literal truth of Scripture confronted seemingly incompatible scientific theories. Green attributed this crisis to the inability of science and religion to find accommodation in the popular version of empiricism widely accepted by educated men and women of his day. In his 371-page introduction to Hume’s Treatise, (...) Green argued that this philosophy was unacceptable, even on its own terms, and that it needed to be replaced with a new philosophy of life, one recognizing that both knowledge and human action are .. (shrink)

The nine papers in this valuable collection were originally presented at a conference commemorating the centenary of the publication of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Although written independently, there is a reasonable unity of aim among them. The goal of each is to rethink issues in Bradley’s metaphysics and to relate them either to Russell or to ongoing debates in analytic philosophy or both. Even though most of the essays cover both topics, four of them are more concerned with Bradley and (...) Russell and five with Bradley and contemporary debates. (shrink)

English summary: It seems that reason is less a universal principle than something inherently bound to the contexts in which it appears. These contributions to a conference held on the occasion of Christoph Schwobel's 60th birthday explore the character of reason's manifold contexts: the grounding of reason in the inner word of God 's Trinitarian life as well as the disclosure of reason and and its limits in human conversation. German description: Vernunft scheint in der Gegenwart weniger ein allgemeines Prinzip (...) als eine in Kontexte eingebundene Grosse zu sein. Die Beitrage einer Tagung anlasslich von Christoph Schwobels 60. Geburtstag, gehen der Frage nach dem Charakter dieser Kontextbindung nach: der Begrundung der Vernunft im trinitarischen Gesprach wie der Erschliessung und Problematisierung der Vernunft im menschlichen Gesprach. Mit Beitragen von V. Brummer, G. van den Brink, C. Drobe, H. J. Eckstein, D.-M. Grube, J. Halfwassen, S. Heine, F. Hermanni, E. Herms, W. Harle, W. Homolka, W. Jeanrond, R. W. Jenson, D. Kelsey, A. F. Koch, A. Kupsch, V. Leppin, P.-C. Lai, P. Lo, A. Min, J. Moltmann, M. Muhling, P. Peterson, M. Sarot, F. Schweitzer, A. Torrance, J. Webster, M. Welker, M. Wendte, M. Wisse, H. Wisskirchen und L. Zak. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to investigate some of the possible sources of inspiration for Orwell’s concept of the artificial language called Newspeak, which, in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, is shown as an effective tool of enslavement and thought control in the hands of a totalitarian state. The author discusses, in this context, the putative links between Newspeak and really existing artificial languages, first of all Esperanto, and also between Orwell’s notion of “doublethink”, which is an important feature of (...) the totalitarian mentality, and Czesław Miłosz’s notion of “ketman”, developed in his book The Captive Mind. But the main emphasis is on the connection between Orwell’s book and the slightly earlier novel by C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. It is well known that Orwell knew Lewis’s book and expressed his mixed feelings about it. There are many specific, though far from obvious, similarities between the two books, but what seems to have been particularly inspiring for Orwell was Lewis’s vision of a thoroughly degenerate language that is used for political manipulation rather than for communication. (shrink)

Artykuł dotyczy zagadnienia wolności indywidualnej i problemu zagrożeń, jakie może pociągać za sobą hołdowanie niektórym jej odmianom. Klasycznie pojmowana wolność, zwana negatywną, utożsamiana z brakiem zewnętrznego przymusu, może stać w opozycji do tak zwanej wolności pozytywnej. To ostatnie pojęcie definiowane jest na ogół poprzez możność, co przywodzi na myśl jego związek z pojęciem władzy. Punktem wyjścia rozważań stała się analiza wybranych aspektów obu wolności. Rozróżnienie tych dwóch fenomenów jest istotne dla zrozumienia niektórych procesów zachodzących we współczesnej wspólnocie politycznej. Konsekwentne odwoływanie (...) się do paradygmatu tzw. wolności pozytywnej może bowiem przynosić trudne do przewidzenia konsekwencje w postaci uzasadnianej ideologicznie ingerencji w wiele sfer ludzkiego działania. Za szczególnie brzemienne w skutki należy uważać konotacje tzw. wolności pozytywnej i równości. W istocie bowiem wolność pozytywna, a szczególnie jej postulat szerzenia równości, staje się pretekstem dla zwiększania zakresu politycznego panowania. Może to wyrażać się w dążności do urzeczywistniania aspiracji jednych grup społecznych kosztem innych. Takie podejście siłą rzeczy stoi w opozycji do poglądów upatrujących fundamentów społecznego porządku w prymacie wolności negatywnej i obowiązywaniu zasad sprawiedliwości. Wspomniana ingerencja instytucji państwa w ludzkie działanie, będąca skutkiem propagowania niektórych aspektów koncepcji „wolności do” może grozić redukcją podmiotowości moralnej osób. (shrink)

W styczniu 1919 roku w odrodzonej Rzeczypospolitej odbyły się wybory do Sejmu Ustawodawczego. Efektem prac Sejmu było uchwalenie Konstytucji w marcu 1921 roku, a także wielu uchwał, m.in. w sprawie reformy rolnej. Największą prawicową siłą w Sejmie była Narodowa Demokracja, skupiona w Związku Ludowo-Narodowym, który z klubu parlamentarnego przekształcił się w 1919 roku w partię polityczną. Celem artykułu jest opis i analiza udziału posłów ZLN, wybranych z obszaru województwa kieleckiego, w pracach Sejmu Ustawodawczego. Podstawę źródłową analizy stanowiły przede wszystkim sprawozdania (...) stenograficzne z posiedzeń Sejmu. Omówiono sylwetki czterech parlamentarzystów, byli to: Konstanty Kowalewski, Franciszek Mazur, Witold Poklewski-Koziełł i Zygmunt Seyda. Reprezentowali oni różne klasy społeczne. Ich zaangażowanie w prace Konstytuanty było odmienne, ale wszyscy starali się solidarnie reprezentować klub parlamentarny ZLN. Największą aktywnością wykazywał się Seyda, prawnik pochodzący z Wielkopolski. (shrink)

W styczniu 1919 roku w odrodzonej Rzeczypospolitej odbyły się wybory do Sejmu Ustawodawczego. Efektem prac Sejmu było uchwalenie Konstytucji w marcu 1921 roku, a także wielu uchwał, m.in. w sprawie reformy rolnej. Największą prawicową siłą w Sejmie była Narodowa Demokracja, skupiona w Związku Ludowo-Narodowym, który z klubu parlamentarnego przekształcił się w 1919 roku w partię polityczną. Celem artykułu jest opis i analiza udziału posłów ZLN, wybranych z obszaru województwa kieleckiego, w pracach Sejmu Ustawodawczego. Podstawę źródłową analizy stanowiły przede wszystkim sprawozdania (...) stenograficzne z posiedzeń Sejmu. Omówiono sylwetki czterech parlamentarzystów, byli to: Konstanty Kowalewski, Franciszek Mazur, Witold Poklewski-Koziełł i Zygmunt Seyda. Reprezentowali oni różne klasy społeczne. Ich zaangażowanie w prace Konstytuanty było odmienne, ale wszyscy starali się solidarnie reprezentować klub parlamentarny ZLN. Największą aktywnością wykazywał się Seyda, prawnik pochodzący z Wielkopolski. (shrink)