Appearance and Reality [Hardcover]

Francis H. Bradley (Author), A. H. Bradley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 26, 1963 | ISBN-10: 0198241097 | ISBN-13: 978-0198241096 | Edition: 2

A metaphysical essay. 592 p. 21.5x14.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 596 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press(UK); 2 edition (March 26, 1963)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198241097
• ISBN-13: 978-0198241096
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,311,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Western Zen in a clear and articulate 19th century package, April 3, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Appearance and Reality (Hardcover)

I'm reviewing a book which is currently out of print. "Why bother?", one might ask. Well, Bradley's work is one of the clearest explanations of ideas which are central to our 20th century fascination with alternate religions. This is not to say that Bradley was exactly a mystic -- his belief system went beyond mysticism. Yet his emphasis on understanding the limits of our mental life finds strong parallels in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, as well as Western 'New Age' approaches. Strangely, he wrote in the 19th century. Modern academic philosophers find his work not particularly important. Yet the average reader can gain quite a lot from reading Bradley, his writing style is clear and lucid, and after finishing the book, interested readers may find their world taking on a slightly different cast. It is disappointing to find that Appearance and Reality is out of print, because it stands, especially today, as a text which explicates basic philosophical issues in a way which remains relevant. Brian Whitaker

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nondualism, December 19, 2002

By 

John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Cuyahoga Falls, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Appearance and Reality (Hardcover)

Something must have _happened_ to Francis Herbert Bradley.

He seems to have been something of a curmudgeon; at least, he was extremely reclusive and had a reputation for shooting cats. But at some point in his life he must have come to some sort of deep mystical realization.

Otherwise he couldn't have written this book, which reads like a Western version of Shankara. This is philosophy in the grand old style, and it's one of the high points of British idealism.

Bradley's argument doesn't always hold up in its precise details. He doesn't, for example, think that "relations" are real because (he says) they lead to an infinite regress. But Royce replied to this pretty adequately in an appendix to _The World and the Individual_. He also states firmly (and I think correctly) that there's no conceiving reality apart from experience and there's no duality in experience between subject and object. But support for this claim isn't exactly forthcoming. (Timothy L.S. Sprigge does a much better job with it in _The Vindication of Absolute Idealism_.)

But the essential structure of his argument is sound and could be carried through again with a different set of examples (the standard logical paradoxes, say): the world of our ordinary experience turns out upon inspection to be contradictory, so it can't be fully and finally real; what _is_ fully and finally real is a nondual Absolute in which all those apparent contradictions are resolved through that very nonduality.

Well, Bradley puts it better than that, of course, and his prose style is very pleasant to read. This work is also excerpted in James W. Allard and Guy Stock's collection of Bradley's _Writings on Logic and Metaphysics_, so if you want to read a shorter version, check that volume out.

Anyway, the point is, don't ever let anybody tell you there isn't any nondualistic wisdom here in the West. In a different time and place, Bradley would have been revered as a guru -- a prospect that in all likelihood would have made him cringe, so it's probably just as well. But he's clearly trying to articulate a vision here, and few writers have tackled "rational mysticism" with such philosophical flair.

I doubt that Shankara would have shot cats. Fortunately the similarities run deeper than that.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A startling answer to the frustrations of analytic puzzles, January 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Appearance and Reality (Hardcover)

This book is indeed extremely important for analytic, continental, and mystic philosophers alike. Bradley's positive view, the Absolute, is proposed here as the _only way out_ of those messy analytic debates regarding topics such as appearance vs. reality, plurality, quality, and causation. Bradley's starting point: what is absurd (logically impossible) cannot exist.