F.H. Bradley

Francis Herbert Bradley was the most formidable British philosopher of the late nineteenth century and the central figure of British Idealism. His Appearance and Reality argued that the manifest world of ordinary experience—relations, things, time, space, causation, and the self—is contradictory and therefore mere appearance, pointing toward an Absolute that transcends all finite relations.

Bradley's Ethical Studies mounted an assault on utilitarian ethics in favour of self-realisation within a social and historical whole, drawing on Hegel while maintaining a distinctively English idiom. His attack on the doctrine of "external relations" provoked the rebellion of Russell and Moore that launched analytic philosophy; his difficult prose and uncompromising monism ensured neglect until late-twentieth-century scholars restored his reputation as one of the genuinely great British philosophers.