Bernard Bosanquet (philosopher)
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"Dr. Inge quotes with approval Bosanquet's dictum that “to throw our ideals into the future is the death of all sane idealism.”"--Symbolism and Belief (1938) by Edwyn Bevan "Call it idealism or call it realism it does not matter. If it is attuned to an ideal at all, it thrives on its stark reality and not on something contingent or problematical. For, to stake the ideal on the future is the death of all sane idealism. The pathway to it may be difficult and tortuous, but there is no short cut to the Promised Land. It is, in the inspiring language of the mystics, ' a flight of the alone to the Alone '. No Mediator, no Redeemer, no Guru can achieve that end vicariously."[1] |
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Bernard Bosanquet (14 June or 14 July 1848, Rock Hall near Alnwick – 8 February 1923, London) was an English philosopher and political theorist, and an influential figure on matters of political and social policy in late 19th and early 20th century Britain.
His work influenced – but was later subject to criticism by – many thinkers, notably Bertrand Russell, John Dewey and William James.
He wrote "The Æsthetic Theory of Ugliness" (1889), A History of Aesthetic (1892) and “On the Nature of Aesthetic Emotion” (1894).
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Biography
He was educated at Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford. After graduation, he was elected to a Fellowship at University College, Oxford, but resigned it in order to devote himself to philosophical research. He moved to London in 1881, where he became an active member of the London Ethical Society and the Charity Organisation Society. Both were positive demonstrations of Bosanquet's ethical philosophy. Bosanquet published on a wide range of topics, such as logic, metaphysics, aesthetics and politics. In his metaphysics, he is regarded as a key representative (with F.H. Bradley) of Absolute Idealism, although it is a term that he abandoned in favour of "speculative philosophy."
Bosanquet was one of the leaders of the so-called neo-Hegelian philosophical movement in Great Britain. He was strongly influenced by the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, but also by the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Among his best-known works are The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899; 4th ed. 1923), and his Gifford lectures, The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual published 1912 and 1913 respectively.
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1894 to 1898.
Idealist Social Theory
In his Encyclopedia, Section 95, Hegel had written about "the ideality of the finite." This obscure, seemingly meaningless, phrase was interpreted as implying that "what is finite is not real" because the ideal is understood as being the opposite of the real. Bosanquet was a follower of Hegel and the "…central theme of Bosanquet's idealism was that every finite existence necessarily transcends itself and points toward other existences and finally to the whole. Thus, he advocated a system very close to that in which Hegel had argued for the ideality of the finite." The relation of the finite individual to the whole state in which he/she lives was investigated in Bosanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State (London, 1899). In this book, he "…argued that the state is the real individual and that individual persons are unreal by comparison with it." But Bosanquet did not think that the state has a right to impose socialist control over its individual citizens. "On the contrary, he believed that if society is organic and individual, then its elements can cooperate apart from a centralised organ of control, the need for which presupposes that harmony has to be imposed upon something that is naturally unharmonious."
External links
- Bernard Bosanquet page
- The Principle of Individuality and Value, Macmillan, 1912. (Gifford Lectures, 1910–12)
- The Value and Destiny of the Individual, Macmillan, 1923. (Gifford Lectures, 1910–12)
- The Philosophical Theory of The State (1899/2001), Kitchener: Batoche Books
- Knowledge and Reality: A Criticism of Mr F H Bradley's Principles of Logic (1885)
- The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art translated and edited (1886)
- Logic, or The Morphology of Knowledge in two volumes: Volume 1, Volume 2 (1888; revised edition 1911)
- Essays and Addresses (1891)
- A History of Aesthetic (1892, second edition 1904)[2]
- The Civilization of Christendom, and other studies (1893)
- A Companion to Plato's Republic for English readers (1895)
- The Education of the Young in the Republic of Plato translated from Books 2,3 and 4(1901)
- Psychology of the Moral Self (1904)
- The Essentials of Logic, being ten lectures on Judgment and Inference (1906)
- The Meaning of Teleology: a lecture read to the British Academy in 1906
- The Distinction Between Mind And Its Objects (1913)
- Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915)
- Social and International Ideals: being studies in patriotism (1917)
- Some Suggestions In Ethics (1919)
- Croce's Aesthetic: a lecture read to the British Academy in 1919
- Implication and Linear Inference (1920)
- What Religion is (1920)
- The Meetings of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy (1921)
- Archives Hub: Bosanquet Papers
See also
