F. H. Bradley
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Francis Herbert Bradley (30 January, 1846 – 18 September, 1924) was a British philosopher.
He 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. In 1865, he entered University College, Oxford.
Bradley was a leading member of the movement known as British idealism, which was strongly influenced by German philosophers Kant and Hegel, and was famous for his pluralistic approach to philosophy. His pluralistic outlook saw a unity transcending divisions between the philosophy of ethics, history, logic, epistemology, metaphysics and psychology.
One characteristic of Bradley's philosophical approach is his technique of distinguishing ambiguity within language, especially within individual words. This technique might be seen as anticipatory of later advances in the philosophy of language.
Bradley was famously criticised in Alfred Jules Ayer's logical empiricist work, Language, Truth and Logic, for making statements that do not meet the requirements of positivist verification principle, e.g. statements such as "The Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution."
The literary scholar A. C. Bradley was his younger brother.
The poet T. S. Eliot wrote a Harvard Ph.D. thesis on Bradley's work but was never granted the degree.
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