Reading Notes: September 15th, 2024

“I remember now Lewis Carroll’s paper. He sent it around with a request for answers. I told him, I remember, I could see in it nothing but a case of hypothetical judgment where the conditions had been made self-contradictory. I agreed that the hypothetical judgment opened perhaps all the hardest problems of philosophy, but I saw nothing whatever in his puzzle but what was quite familiar & arose in any case of hypothetical judgment from an impossible or unreal foundation. (I may be wrong but that is all I see in it now.) I told him, if he wanted paradox, I would offer him this (which I was prepared to maintain). “No conclusion can be drawn from any premise which is not false”. For, if it is true, what possible excuse have you for deserting it? What I did not (so far as I remember) add was that, while all truth must in the end be categorical, all implication must necessarily be hypothetical. For what is is, & what is not is not, & neither is implied. And this applies certainly to the fact of implication, so far as it is the fact of implication, & not some other & different fact. Or, to put it otherwise, in a world of mere facts there could not possibly be a fact of implication.” (Bradley, Letter to Bertrand Russell, 17th February 1904) [Editor’s Note: Bradley [here] recalls his exchange with Lewis Carroll in May 1894 when Carroll was developing ‘A Logical Paradox’.]

“I look forward to my future dealings with your Appearance and Reality as the great task of the rest of my life. I have only read it once, and must confess to a temperamental mistrust of the dialectics and inner inconsistencies of things and their relations, the “between” business, etc. Nevertheless that is the central pivot of metaphysics, and you have for the first time brought it fairly and squarely into the middle of English philosophy, from which henceforward it can never be removed. Your nuts must first be cracked, and as I say, I haven’t yet cracked them. My colleague Royce has (as you doubtless know) been using your book as the text of a very successful course on metaphysics [at Harvard]. He too is a dialectician and an absolutist, only his Absolute is a Mind. Don’t you know his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and his Spirit of Modern Philosophy? He is a wonderful genius, to me as Hyperion to a Satyr!” (William James, Letter to F.H. Bradley, July 9th, 1895)