Stratified reality in Francis Bradley’s idealism, its critics and a personalistic alternative

Abstract

It was at the turn of the the twentieth century when Francis Bradley’s metaphysics perme­ated with the spirit of German Idealism was one of the strongest trends of English aca­demic philosophy. But after the “neopositivist Brexit” launched by Russell, Moore and some other analytical thinkers it became mainly a subject for historians of idealism. An attempt is undertaken in the paper to reveal both the historical and actual significance of Bradley’s doctrine of degrees of reality along with an estimation of his critics’ argu­ments and the author’s own criticisms of his “ontology of the Absolute”. Bradley’s ideal­ism is fit unto the framework of comparative ontology, in the first place by its juxtaposi­tion with mostly congenial “absolutism” of Advaita-Vedānta. The author suggests also his own version of differing and quantifying reality, in the shape of individual landscapes of reality in the context of their comparison with personal valuables.