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The Vindication of Absolute Idealism

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Absolute Idealism isn't dead, and Timothy Sprigge has breathed new life into one of its incarnations: panpsychism.

In this fascinating volume, Sprigge elaborates and defends the view that ultimately, reality consists of "experience" -- little nuggets of it, integrated into one tremendous overarching Experience. Sound implausible? Not after Sprigge is through; he presents his thesis clearly and cogently, and offers several genuinely new arguments for it (including a nicely developed view of physical entities as "concrete universals").

Since I happen to find Sprigge's thesis intuitively plausible and in some ways highly attractive, I am also inclined to be extremely critical of arguments in its favor; it is notoriously easy to be misled to a desired conclusion. (I also suspect, from what I have read of Sprigge's other works, that he draws ethical and political conclusions from this thesis with which I would disagree.) But I shall not critique his arguments here; suffice it to say that Sprigge renders panpsychism at least newly defensible. At any rate some of the reading is tough going, and I shall have to reread his arguments a few more times before I am dead sure I have followed them correctly.

But some of the recent work done in the current "Idealist renaissance" has persuaded me to take another look at several theses that I had earlier thought it necessary to abandon. Sprigge's fascinating work in this volume is at the top of the list. It is highly recommended to anyone who finds materialism implausible and dualism an unhappy compromise. At the very least, it is an important contribution to a generations-long dialogue and its arguments deserve to be considered.

Philosophy's supposed to make you think, not just think up clever reasons for what you already believe in, but make you question exactly what you believe in. For that reason, Sprigge's masterwork is far superior to any British work of philosophy since McTaggart (or maybe since Whitehead and Collingwood), because unlike lovely old Bertie Russell & Freddie Ayer, Sprigge doesn't leave you feeling how pointless reading philosophy is. At the same time, though, it's not just pseudo-mystical rubbish, it is actually systematic, thorough and extremely convincing. My only criticism is that he doesn't address the challenges of philosophers like Heidegger, and that he doesn't extend this work beyond the relatively narrow frontiers he has set himself (only one mention of Hegel and only one of McTaggart, both far more far-reaching thinkers than Sprigge). Aside from that, though, this is an open-minded and inherently plausible work which actually tells you more about what the world is really like, and has more good reasons to back it up, than almost any philosophical work which has ever been published, even if in terms of complexity and originality it is stimulating but not amazingly innovative.