Reading Notes: March 19th, 2022

“The argument which has met us again and again, and which Bradley treats as cardinal, satisfyingly consistent, is that what must be, if there is nothing against it, really is (239, 242). Such satisfaction, Bradley claims, his system offers.” (Lofthouse, F.H. Bradley, 177) 

“[T]he repeated argument from “may be” to “must be”…is stated more than once in the needlessly provocative form that in the Absolute, “possibility is enough” (199); “possibility is all we require in order to prove reality” (218). We know that all is reconciled in the Absolute, though we do not know how; “but because this result must be, and because there is nothing against it, we believe that it is” (239). There is nothing which “declines to take its place within the system of our universe”; nothing which tends to show that the Absolute is not possible, and that is all we need; since it is necessary, it is certain (242). This is indeed a matter of logic rather than metaphysics. “Where you have an idea and cannot doubt, there logically you must assert” (514). Either affirmation or negation; and since a single possibility (such as the existence of the Absolute) cannot contradict itself, it must be affirmed (ibid).).” (Lofthouse, F.H. Bradley, 189) 

“Show me your idea of an Other, not part of experience, and I will show you at once that it is…nothing else at all.” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 523) 

“Feeling is certainly not “un-differentiated” if that means that it contains no diverse aspects.” (Bradley, The Contrary and the Disparate, 472) 

“However, the adverbial analysis of sensory acquaintance seems to fit Bradley’s general position, since it retains an idealist flavour by construing sensations as types of experiences, or modifications of the conscious perceiver….Adverbial analyses oppose act-object analyses of immediate sensory acquaintance.” (Crossley, The Multiple Contents of Immediacy, 182-183) 

“If we call a mental state which can have another mental state as its object a second order mental state, then a first-order mental state will be one which cannot, for whatever reason, have a mental state, even itself, as its object.” (Crossley, The Multiple Contents of Immediacy, 189) 

“The point is whether idealism, taken either in the sense of Prof. Pattison or in that of Mr. Richardson, is able to yield a satisfactory interpretation of the world of external experience. The reaction in recent years [Note: the year is 1920] to some form of realism is a token dissatisfaction with current idealistic theories. And, perhaps, in this connexion it may be worthwhile to indicate some objections which idealism has to meet. Let me begin with the view of the outward world set forth by Prof. Pattison in his Gifford Lectures….The Berkeleyan type of idealism is rejected, and a clear distinction is drawn between existing “in a mind” and “for a mind”. Hence a “thing” is not identified with a “form of conscious experience,” which is described as mentalism. On the other hand, the Kantian figment of the unrelated “thing in itself” is condemned….But Prof. Pattison warns us that his view is not to be taken as implying that the external world presupposes a system of independent existences; and he falls back on the idea of the “essential relatedness” of matter and mind, nature and spirit. Nature, we are told, is organic to mind, and the material world in the end falls within the scope of the larger idealistic principle of the centrality and supremacy of mind. Here we seem to have the theory that the nature of the material is solved by regarding it as organic to mind in that wide sense which it is sought to distinguish from mentalism.” (Galloway, Idealism and the External World, 72-73)

“It is characteristic of realists to separate ontology from epistemology and of idealists to mix the two things up. By “idealists” here I am mainly referring to the British neo-Hegelians (“objective idealists”) but the charge of mixing up ontology and epistemology can be made against at least one “subjective idealist”, namely Bishop Berkeley, as his well-known dictum “esse is percipi” testifies. The objective idealists rejected the correspondence theory of truth and on the whole accepted a coherence theory….The idealists’ notion of coherence included that of comprehensiveness, which allows for empirical control….Now coherence provides a good account of warranted assertability, but it is a poor definition of truth. This confusion between epistemology and ontology is starkly evident in H.H. Joachim’s use of the horrible phrase “knowledge-or-truth” in his posthumously published lectures….[To] base the notion of truth on that of warranted assertability in general, not just on that of rigorous proof…[is to] slide into idealism and [loosen one’s] intellectual grip on the real world. This epistemological approach restricts the real to the field of the cognitive abilities of rational beings, and we have no reason to suppose that reality must be so restricted.” (Smart, Realism v. Idealism, 295) [Underlining is mine]

“Confusion of theories and the world they are about is a persistent temptation….In idealism the confusion (if it exists) may be kept hidden from view because of the use of psychologistic language. Theory is supposed to articulate what in less sophisticated experience is apprehended as a “vague whole of immediate feeling”., to use G.R.G. Mure’s words in his Idealist Epilogue. Mure says “The intuitive moment is the immediate grasp of the experienced content” and “…attention selects within a vague whole of immediate feeling”. With this selection comes articulation and synthesis and we are on the way to physics and other sciences. It is easy to see how this sort of talk can lead temptingly to idealism. Thus, Mure talked (characteristically of neo-Hegelian idealists) of an experienced content. But it can be confusing to say that we experience contents. A drunkard may have an experience as of seeing a pink rat. We must not say, however, that a pink rat is part of the content of the drunkard’s experience. There is no pink rat and so no pink rat to be part of the content of the experience. An idealist might reply that the pink rat has some sort of minimal reality, since it forms part of a system of ideas, even though a not very coherent or comprehensive one. Once more I detect the same sort of analogue of a use-mention fallacy. It is the idea of a pink rat that forms part of a pink of a not very coherent or comprehensive system of ideas, and the idea of a pink rat is not a pink rat. I have indicated that I suspect this fallacy of operating, in a hidden way, in G.R.G. Mure’s system. I am more uncertain about Bradley…but there are other passages [in Bradley’s work] which do strongly suggest the confusion I have in mind.” (Smart, Realism v. Idealism, 296-297) 

“[P]ropositions…(or “judgments” as the idealists psychologistically put it)…” (Smart, Realism v. Idealism, 301) 

“Suppose we encounter something that seems anomalous, in the sense of being radically inexplicable within our established scientific worldview.” (Frankish, Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, 2)