Bradley's Logic (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 285 Anthony Manser. Bradley'sLogic.Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. Pp. x + 22o. $29.95. It is just about time for renewed interest in Bradley and, more generally, in the British Hegelians. Almost a century has elapsed since the publication of Appearance and Reality (1893) and more than a century since Principlesof Logic(1883), the work that occupies center-stage in Manser's drama. The thesis of Bradley'sLogicis that the revolution in British philosophy, of which Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein are leading characters, antedates them by a full half-century. This revolution is initially a revolution against Mill's empiricism and against clericalism in the universities. There are two separable claims at issue here: one philosophical, one sociological. The philosophical and sociological histories should be told separately. The philosophical history can be read dialectically. Mill's empiricism and psychologism are superseded by Bradley's rationalism and realism, which is superseded by Russell's empiricism and realism. Bradley's Hegelianism becomes, on Manser's view, part of the sociology of intellectual history. The decline of the religiously oriented philosophy of the universities created a spiritual gap, which was conveniently filled by Hegelianism, a philosophy that is both spiritual and secular. The history Manser describes is complicated and even confusing because the philosophical and sociological strands are intertwined , and what the logic of an historical event might suggest should happen does not always. This is a rich and complex book that defies general summary. I can do little more here than catalogue the chapter topics and then talk briefly about a few of the many interesting points in Manser's book. In addition to two chapters giving the historical background to Bradley's work, this book contains ten chapters on the central topics in Bradley's logic, including: ideas, words and meanings, the concrete universal, judgment, internal relations, forms ofjudgrnent, and inference. Bradley's philosophy is difficult and Manser always tries valiantly to be clear although I have not always understood his exposition. One of Manser's main points is that what unites Bradley philosophically with Russell, Moore, and contemporary analytic philosophers is the concept of mean!ng. This explains Manser's emphasis on Bradley's Principles of Logic and his lack of interest in Appearanceand Reality. Manser is at his best in explaining Bradley's criticisms of Mill although he might have done well to have compared Bradley's arguments with Frege's. Manser points out quite correctly the identity or similarity between theses of Bradley and those of Russell and contemporary philosophers: that the judgment or sentence is a more fundamental unit of meaning than a concept or word; that the grammatical form of a sentence is not always its logical form; that some categorical propositions are logically hypothetical propositions; and that not all propositions are subject/predicate in form. Moreover, Manser does not ignore the fact that Bradley does not always niean exactly what contemporary philosophers mean by these theses or argue for them in the same way. Bradley holds that the correct form of every true proposition is "Reality is such that S-P" and that reality is the true subject of every proposition (1o3), even false 286 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ones. "Thus 'Reality is such that S-P' says that judgments claim truth; this is what makes them into judgments" (lo3). Is "Reality is such that" simply an assertion operator? It appears so.- At least "reality" in "Reality is such that" does "not say anything about reality in a metaphysical sense" (lo3-o4). Manser compares Bradley's view to what appears to be a similar doctrine of Frege and Davidson. Bradley's doctrine appears to be analogous to Frege's view about the assertion sign, which Frege says is the "common predicate for alljudgments." Donald Davidson has argued that "is true" is likewise a common predicate for all judgments. Manser thinks that Bradley's view may be superior to those of Frege and Davidson in this regard: that Bradley makes the expression of the distinctive content of each judgment the predicate , which he claims "is less likely to arouse thought of ontology" 0o6). I do not think that the predicate...