Candlish's Bradley

I switched to Philosophy just after I finished my bachelor's degree in Physics. I was at St. Stephen's College, Delhi then, and having disliked studying Physics, decided to switch to Philosophy. The Head of the Philosophy welcomed me to the subject and recommended that as preparation, I should read Bradley's Appearance and Reality. A miserable summer followed: one in which I was driven into the arms of Bertrand Russell, in which vicinity I have been more or less content to languish ever since.

No wonder then that Eric's post on Stewart Candlish's report of 18 myths about F. H. Bradley caught my attention, especially as he (Eric) seems to class me (more or less correctly) as the kind of guy who would believe all 18. This drove me to read the first 40 pages of Candlish's book. It was an absorbing read, but ...

... I can now report that it is a curious kind of professional history of philosophy—a book that wishes to "set the record straight". At the same time, it lacks a clear account of why a non-historian should care about the Russell-Bradley dispute—of why straightening the record seems so urgent. Candlish himself seems angry that Bradley got bad press. (For instance, he suddenly slams Russell's Cambridge as the university that produced "spies".) Why does it matter 100 years later if he did? Was Bradley right about what he was attacked for? Did he say something to which we should now pay attention? Would we have been paying attention, but for the 18 myths?

Here are two passages that I found puzzling in Candlish, simply because they seemed so gratuitous.

Myth 3 Bradley was a Hegelian.

Candlish comments by quoting Bradley:

For Hegel himself, assuredly I think him a great philosopher; but I never could have called myself an Hegelian, partly because I cannot say that I have mastered his system, and partly because I could not accept what seems his main principle, or at least part of that principle.

Surely, Bradley's self-description does not settle the issue one way or another. Candlish says he will not discuss the matter further. Why bring it up?

Myth 7 (part) Bradley confused predication and identity.

Candlish refers us to the beginning of Chapter 2 of Appearance and Reality. Here Bradley says that you cannot take 'Sugar is sweet' to assert that sugar and sweet are identical because then you couldn't say 'Sugar is sweet and sugar is white but white is not sweet'.  So far so good. But now, says Bradley, "if we inquire what there can be in the thing beside its several qualities, we are baffled once more." Why baffled? Because sugar can't be anything other than its qualities. (So it is sweetness and whiteness?)

I read this as an attempt at a destructive dilemma. One horn assumes that 'is' denotes identity; the other that it doesn't. The only trouble is that the second horn is refuted on the assumption that it does so denote. I honestly don't see anything here that leads me to think that Bradley was on to anything important. According to Candlish, expressing himself as "briefly and compellingly" as he can, Bradley thought that predication "seems to link things quite arbitrarily." Frankly, I don't find the complaint of arbitrariness in the text (and I wouldn't understand the point if I did).

Ah, while students rioted in Paris that summer of 1968, I read AR.