F. H. Bradley

Francis Herbert Bradley (1846 to 1924) was the most famous, original and philosophically influential of the British Idealists, a group that came to prominence in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Born at Clapham, then in Surrey and since absorbed into London, he was the eldest surviving son of the Evangelical preacher Charles Bradley. In December 1870 he was elected to a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, tenable for life and carrying no teaching duties, and he held it until his death. The Idealists rejected key aspects of the tradition of Hume and Mill and responded instead, in an original and critical way, to Kant and Hegel. Bradley is best known for his metaphysics, which argues that the everyday conceptions of the world contain hidden contradictions. In 1924 he became the first philosopher to receive the Order of Merit.