The Principles of Logic
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~180,000 words · 872 passages
Cite this work
- APAF. H. Bradley. (n.d.). The Principles of Logic. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/f-h-bradley/the-principles-of-logic
- MLAF. H. Bradley. "The Principles of Logic." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/f-h-bradley/the-principles-of-logic.
- ChicagoF. H. Bradley. The Principles of Logic. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/f-h-bradley/the-principles-of-logic.
What it is about
Bradley's first major book: what a judgement really is, what an inference is, and why the logic he had been taught did not explain either.
Context and history
Published in 1883, ten years before Appearance and Reality, and it is where he prepares the ground for that book. The main attack is on the English empiricist tradition — on the idea that thinking is the association of particular ideas — and he argues that every judgement attributes something to reality as a whole, not to an isolated piece of it. It appeared just as modern formal logic was being born in another direction, and the contrast between the two ways of understanding what logic is what still makes it worth reading.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
IT is with mixed feelings that this reissue of an old work is offered to the public. I am happy to find that a book of mine is still alive, and that after some forty years it has seemed worthy to reappear. On the other hand I regret that, while Logic during this interval has lived and moved, I myself have failed, except partially, to follow its advance. My available energy has been expended mainly in fields which more or less fall outside Logic proper. And it is too late for me now to make good my shortcoming, and to endeavour to master those more recent works which have succeeded in throwing, at the lowest estimate, much light on their subject. Hence I could not rewrite my book so as to offer it as an adequate account of contemporary Logic. And on the other hand simply to reprint it, or again, so far as I am concerned, to let it die, seemed alike open to objection. I therefore de cided, while reissuing the old volume, to add to it some notes and an appendix with a view to correct and supplement some part of its defects. At the same time I saw clearly that any such addition would still leave the book largely incomplete. The course which I have followed may even perhaps result in some gain to the reader. He can, if he pleases, now verify any advance which in 1883 may have