The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy

Barry Dainton, Howard Robinson, Barry Dainton, Howard Robinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441126283
• eBook ISBN: 9781441163042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Surveying the history, latest developments and potential future directions of contemporary analytic philosophy, this is an essential one-volume reference guide for all those working in the field. The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy brings together a team of internationally renowned scholars to explore all the major areas of inquiry, key concepts and most important thinkers in the analytic tradition. Topics covered include: • The history of analytic philosophy, from Frege, Moore and Russell to Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle and beyond
• Philosophy of mind and language from early developments to the most recent advances
• Perspectives in moral and political philosophy
• Contemporary metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of science and mathematics
• The latest thinking on perception, free will and personal identity The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy also includes a historical chronology and a full guide to further reading and available resources, making this an invaluable library or desktop reference guide for anyone working in the discipline today.

Part I

History, Methods, and Problems

1	A Different World

Barry Dainton

For anyone who has spent time immersed in, or who is a product of, the Anglophone-analytic philosophical tradition that has held sway in recent decades, since the war of 1939–45 say, the philosophical world in which Russell and Moore found themselves in the 1890s would very likely seem a very unfamiliar place. The overall tenor of recent analytical philosophy has been profoundly naturalistic and physicalistic. On this view, the fundaments of the world are the elementary particles and fields posited by physics, which are all, without exception, entirely nonmental in nature. The dominant and most dynamic movement in mid-to-late nineteenth-century British philosophy was neo-Hegelian idealism. On this view, the world in its entirety is mental through and through. The intellectual world Russell and Moore rebelled against—the philosophical tradition to whose downfall they contributed significantly—could scarcely be more different from the one their rebellion would help to create.

The leading figures in the movement that came to be labeled “British Idealism” included Thomas Green (1836–82), Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), Harold Joachim (1868–1938), Francis Bradley (1846–1924), and John McTaggart (1866–1925). Although these men are often depicted as fusty reactionaries, this view of them is quite wrong: in their own day they were widely credited with revitalizing British philosophy by opening it up to important but hitherto ignored developments in the (post-Kantian) Continental tradition; the idealists viewed themselves—and were viewed by others—as something not far short of revolutionaries in their own right.

McTaggart taught in Cambridge, where Moore and Russell were both instructed—and initially inspired—by him.¹ Bradley studied and had a nonteaching fellowship at Oxford, and in the 1890s he was generally acknowledged to be the leading philosopher of his generation.² McTaggart told Moore that he believed Bradley to be the greatest living philosopher, and recalled that whenever Bradley came in “he felt as if a Platonic Idea had entered the room” (Levy 1981, p. 109). Philosophy being what it is, there were significant divergences of doctrine between the leading idealists. Green believed that God, in the form of a timeless consciousness, was immanent in us all, and that “the unfolding of the eternal consciousness is the increasing manifestation of God in the world.” McTaggart was a pluralist, and argued that reality, at bottom, is composed of interrelated immaterial selves. Doctrinal differences aside, the idealists agreed that Kant had definitively demonstrated that empiricism and related philosophies were utterly hopeless, but they also agreed with Hegel that central elements of Kant’s own metaphysical system were problematic. Particularly problematic was the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal world of appearances, and the “noumenal” (unknowable) reality-as-it-is-in-itself. Hegel argued that the latter should be dispensed with, and his British followers tended to agree. Since all that remains is the phenomenal world, the world-as-experienced, it seems clear that reality itself is must be experiential in nature. Having established this conclusion the foundations of idealism are secure, and all that remains is to determine the precise character of this wholly mental reality, and here there are plenty of options. For our purposes, a brief overview of some of the main elements of Bradley’s metaphysics will suffice. As the acknowledged leader of the Idealist movement, Bradley was the single most important figure during the period in question, and elements of his position were directly targeted by the rebels—by Russell in particular.

Bradley was a monistic “absolute” (or “objective”) idealist who upheld the doctrine that reality consists of a single unified thing—the Absolute—and that this one thing is wholly experiential in nature. His metaphysic is also holistic: all the parts of the Absolute are mutually interdependent; they are such that the character of each impinges, even if only slightly, on all the rest. He also held that the Absolute was beyond our comprehension: any attempt fully to characterize it conceptually inevitably falls short, to some degree. The best we can hope to achieve are approximations. For Bradley both truth and reality always come in degrees. Naturally, he believed his own metaphysic possessed a greater degree of truth than rival systems.

Bradley arrived at this view via a combination of reason and experience.

In his metaphysics he aimed to start with as few preconceptions as possible, and arrive at a conception of reality that was maximally satisfying to the intellect.³ His major metaphysical work Appearance and Reality (1893) falls into two parts. The first (shorter) part is destructive: Bradley argues here that our ordinary ways of thinking about the world (both the naive and the more philosophically sophisticated) turn out to conceal contradictions when subjected to close scrutiny: “the world, as so understood, contradicts itself; and is therefore appearance, and not reality” (1893, p. 11). In the longer second part he expounds his mentalistic account of the general nature of reality. His targets in the initial destructive phase of operations include the self, space, time, motion, things, activity, and the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities. The Kantian doctrine of unknowable things-in-themselves he rejects as an absurdity: “The Unknowable must, of course, be prepared either to deserve its name, or not. But if it actually were not knowable, we could not know that such a thing even existed . . . And this seems inconsistent” (ibid., p. 129). As for the doctrine that reality might contain components that are nonmental, Bradley found this wanting:

. . . I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning . . . I cannot try to think of it without realizing either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced . . . The fact that falls elsewhere seems, in my mind, to be a mere word and a failure, or else an attempt at self-contradiction. (ibid., p. 128)

There are obvious similarities here to an famous antimaterialist argument of Berkeley’s. The most original and important parts of the destructive phase of Bradley’s argument are his attacks on predication and relations, and it is the elimination of the latter that opens the way to his monism.

Consider a simple thing, such as a lump of sugar. We have here an object (the lump) and its various properties (its size, shape, whiteness, etc.). The object and its properties obviously form a single whole—the propertied object—that possesses a genuine unity. But how, precisely, are we to make sense of this most familiar of situations? How do the properties and object manage to combine into a genuine whole? One option is to construe the object itself as something entirely distinct from its properties, a “bare particular,” as such things are sometimes known. But these are obscure and dubious entities—it is not obvious that something entirely lacking in properties could exist—and we are still faced with the problem of how the object, construed thus, is related to its various properties. Another option is to hold that the object is nothing more than a bundle of properties. This has its merits, but it raises another issue: what is it that connects the properties to one another when they constitute an object? Once again we are confronted with the task of understanding relations, this time between properties themselves. The importance of relations extends well beyond the metaphysics of individual objects. The entire universe, as usually conceived, consists of a vast multiplicity of objects, and these objects are all related to one another, in multiple ways. Some are attracting others (e.g. via electrical or gravitational forces), some are impacting on others (e.g. in collisions), and more generally all the (nonabstract) objects in our universe are related to one another spatially or temporally—if they were not, they could not be said to exist in the same universe at all.

In chapter III of Appearance and Reality Bradley unleashes a dense barrage of arguments, the target of which is none other than relations in general, the glue that (we normally assume) holds the world together. His aim: to demonstrate that it is simply incoherent to think that the world could be composed of objects or properties (“qualities” in his terminology) standing in relations to one another. There are, of course, different ways of conceiving of relations. Here, and in subsequent writings, Bradley argued that every way of conceiving of relations was deeply problematic. One of his arguments—often referred to simply as Bradley’s Regress—has acquired particular renown. One way of construing relations, in some respects a natural one, is as entities of a distinctive kind, which can exist independently of any particular objects they happen to relate. If relations are truly distinct from their relata, then if relation R holds between objects O₁ and O₂, say, we need a (metaphysical) account as to how and why this is so, and the only obvious way forward is to introduce further relations R_A and R_B, which connect R to O₁ and O₂. Since the same question now arises with respect to the connecting of R_A and R_B to their relata, we are embarked on an infinite explanatory regress, and Bradley—somewhat controversially—took this to mean that relations could not be real. Now, we already know that, for Bradley, reality is experiential in nature. If all relations are unreal, then reality cannot consist of a plurality of distinct but related things, hence Bradley’s conclusion: “. . . the Absolute is one system, and . . . its contents are nothing but sentient experience. It will hence be a single and all-inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. For it cannot be less than appearance, and hence no feeling or thought, of any kind, can fall outside its limits” (1893, p. 147).

Although Bradley held that anything approaching a full appreciation of the nature of the Absolute was beyond us, he also maintained that our own experience provides us with some important, even if partial, insights into its real nature. More specifically, the unity we find in our own experience is a guide to the nonrelational nature of the Absolute itself: “That on which my view rests is the immediate unity which comes in feeling” (1914, pp. 230–1). To appreciate something of what Bradley had in mind, reflect for a moment on the sort of experience one has when lying in a grassy field, looking up at the sky. One’s overall state of consciousness includes bodily feelings (the warmth of the sun on one’s skin, the tickling of the grass), together with the contents of one’s conscious thoughts (“It really is warm today” and so forth), the sound of birdsong, and the sight of the surrounding trees. These various experiences are very different in character, but they are all experienced together, as part of a single unified episode of consciousness.⁴ But although one’s visual and auditory experiences are unified—this much is undeniable—the unity seems to be primitive and unmediated: one is aware of the auditory and visual contents together, but one is not aware of any form of connecting or connective element that comes between and binds the contents. If there is a relation between these contents, it is not something that possesses any discernible experiential features it can call its own. According to Bradley at least, it is nonrelational in a further respect: we can recognize distinctions between the various parts or aspects of our overall states of consciousness, but these parts are not objects that are capable of a separate or independent existence: “the unity of feelings contains no individual terms with relations between them, while without these no experience can be really relational” (1935, p. 642).

If the universe is a single entity, then some form of holism is difficult to avoid. If seemingly distinct objects (e.g. this table, that chair) are in reality merely aspects of one thing, then they are clearly not independent of one another in the way we commonly suppose. Bradley argued for a stronger form of holism, according to which the character of the whole impacts on the nature of the parts.⁵ One part of his case for this derives his logical doctrines. Bradley defended the view that all judgments—even categorical ones—are in fact abbreviated inferences. So to determine whether a judgment is true or false requires us to assess the truth of the premises of the relevant inference, and since these premises will themselves be condensed inferences—and so on ad infinitum—the truth of any one claim depends on indefinitely many more.⁶ But there was also an experiential (or empirical) underpinning to Bradley’s holism. For as we have just seen, in Bradley’s view the constituents of our total states of experience are not separable and distinct parts, and what goes for our experience also holds of the Absolute, which is itself a unified consciousness.

2	From Idealism to a Realistic (Platonic) Pluralism

Barry Dainton

Russell once observed that thinkers tend to fall into one of two categories. On the one hand there are those who view the universe as being akin to a bowl of jelly: a single, unified whole that is such that if any part of it is touched the whole quiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Overview
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Part I: History, Methods, and Problems
• Part II: Current Research and Issues
• Part III: New Directions in Analytic Philosophy
• Chronology
• Timeline of Individual Philosophers
• A–Z of Key Terms and Concepts
• Resources
• Annotated Bibliography
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright