Philosophy in the modern world a new history of western philosophy, volume 4 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 65

PEIRCE TO STRAWSON tions, but only to judgements about being as a whole In Appearance and Reality Bradley sought to show that if we try to conceive the universe as a complex of independent substances distinct from their relations to each other we fall into contradiction Every item in the universe is related—internally related, by its very essence—to every other item The objects of everyday experience, the space and time that they inhabit, and indeed the very subject of experience, the individual self—all these are mere appearances, helpful for practical purposes, but quite misleading as to the true nature of reality The dominance of idealism was decisively called into question at the turn of the century by two young Cambridge philosophers, G E Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) Both were pupils of McTaggart and took their first steps in philosophy as Hegelians But Russell found Hegel himself much less impressive than McTaggart, and was disgusted by his woolly attitude to mathematics Moore, in ‘The Nature of Judgement’ (1899), rejected the fundamental thesis that reality is a creation of the mind, and replaced it with a Platonic realism: concepts are objective, independent realities, and the world consists of such concepts combined with each other into true propositions After this attack on metaphysical idealism, Moore four years later attacked empiricist idealism In ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ he rejected the claim that esse is percipi; to exist is something quite different from being perceived, and the objects of our knowledge are independent of our knowledge of them Moreover, material objects are something we directly perceive Moore’s revolt against idealism had a great impact on Russell ‘It was an immense excitement’, he later recalled, ‘after having supposed the sensible world unreal, to be able to believe again that there really were such things as tables and chairs’ (A 135) He received a great sense of liberation from the thought that, pace Locke and his successors, grass really was green Like Moore, he combined his renunciation of idealism with the affirmation of a Platonic faith in universals: every word, particular or general, stood for an objective entity In particular, in reaction against Bradley, he attached great importance to the independent reality of relations In a brilliant study of the philosophy of Leibniz in 1899 he went so far as to maintain that the elaborate and incredible structure of the metaphysics of monads arises from the single error of thinking that all sentences must be of subject– predicate form, instead of realizing that relational sentences are irreducible to that pattern 48