F.H. Bradley
English idealist philosopher (Francis Herbert Bradley, 1846–1924), born in Clapham, London, educated at Merton College, Oxford, where he spent the rest of his life as a permanent fellow enjoying a singular academic position — excused from almost all teaching duties due to a chronic kidney condition he had suffered from a young age — which allowed him to devote himself almost exclusively to producing one of the most ambitious and systematic philosophical works of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British idealism. A central figure of so-called 'absolute idealism', profoundly influenced by Hegel though critical of specific aspects of his dialectic, Bradley developed in his masterwork, Appearance and Reality (1893), a radical metaphysics arguing, through a dialectical method of relentless analysis of our ordinary conceptual categories — relation, quality, space, time, causality, self — that all of them turn out to be internally contradictory and thus mere 'appearances' incapable of constituting ultimate reality, which can only be conceived as a single, indivisible, coherent, supra-relational 'Absolute Experience' in which all apparent contradictions are dissolved and harmonised. This destructive critique of the notion of external relation — the argument that any relation between two things seems to require, in order to be explained, additional relations in an untenable infinite regress — decisively influenced, though in reverse, as a target of refutation, the founders of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy, especially Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, who at the start of the twentieth century explicitly rejected Bradleyan idealism and its relational monism in favour of a pluralist realism grounded in genuine external relations, this break becoming one of the foundational episodes of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Also the author of Ethical Studies (1876), in which he defended a theory of ethical self-realisation under the formula 'my station and its duties', Bradley exerted notable influence — through T.S. Eliot, who wrote his doctoral thesis on him — on English modernist literature as well.