While history suggests that the founder of analytical philosophy, Bertrand Russell, won the fight against the idealists led by F.H. Bradley, in this instalment of our idealism series, in partnership with the Essentia Foundation, Yale philosopher Michael Della Rocca argues that Russell failed to even address Bradley’s central argument. But ignoring Bradley’s timeless message puts in serious jeopardy not only our basic understanding of ethics, but also the ultimate nature of reality itself.

In 1910, an event took place in the pages of the journal Mind that would turn out to be pivotal for the entire subsequent course of philosophy. This was a debate spread over two consecutive issues between the British philosophers F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell about Bradley’s version of monism and idealism. These articles had rather boring titles – Bradley’s “On Appearance, Error, and Contradiction” and Russell’s “Some Explanations in Reply to Mr. Bradley”– but the exchange proved revelatory.

This showdown was over Bradley’s central argument for the view that relations are not real. In other words, for Bradley, such ordinary claims as “I am five meters from the door” or “Bradley was born before Russell” are not strictly true.  Of course, almost all of us believe that claims of this kind are true and that there really are relations between distinct things. But not Bradley.

This is not surprising for Bradley, who – like a small proportion of philosophers previously and an even smaller proportion of philosophers subsequently – was no respecter of commonsense. Bradley devoted the whole of his 1893 book, Appearance and Reality, to arguing for and drawing out the implications of this non-commonsensical denial of relations.

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There is no distinction between normative facts and non-normative facts, and without such a distinction it is difficult to see how morality itself is possible.

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