F. H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy

F. H. Bradley, an exemplar of British Idealism, offered a rich strain of idealism that has been unduly neglected for almost a century. Beyond idealism's reputation as mere fanciful speculation, Bradley's work plumbs the everyday difficulties of thinking a world infused with feeling, of a world that never divides into easily rational fragments. For Bradley, our inner lives and our outer lived experience entangle and pollute one another a mess that requires collective dialectical thinking to unravel.This book engages with Bradley's central problem, of how to think the gap between one's experience and the structure of reality on which it is founded, as one that still haunts contemporary philosophy. Not only was this pivotal to the post-Continental philosophy of the 2000s but it also remains extremely relevant for renewed interest in Spinoza and Hegel as well as for how contemporary analytic philosophy defines itself with and against metaphysics.

Ben Woodard is an affiliated fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin Germany. He has published numerous texts on the relation between naturalism and idealism as well as the history, philosophy, and politics of biology. He is the author of Schelling's Naturalism: Motion, Space and the Volition of Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).