Timothy Sprigge | |
---|---|
Born | 14 January 1932 London, England, UK |
Died | 11 July 2007 |
Alma mater | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |
Notable work | The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984) |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | British idealism |
Timothy Lauro Squire Sprigge (14 January 1932 – 11 July 2007), usually cited as T. L. S. Sprigge, was a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and latterly an Emeritus Fellow.
Sprigge was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Bryanston School in Dorset. He studied English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1952–1955), then switched to philosophy, completing his PhD under A. J. Ayer. [1] He taught philosophy at University College, London and Sussex University before becoming Regius Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh.
Long concerned with the nature of experience and the relationship between mind and reality, Sprigge was the philosopher who first posed the question made famous by Thomas Nagel: "What is it like to be a bat?" [1] Throughout his career he argued that physicalism or materialism is not only false, but has contributed to a distortion of our moral sense. The failure to respect the rights of human beings and non-human animals is therefore largely a metaphysical error of failing to grasp the true reality of the first person, subjective perspective of consciousness, or sentience. The practice of vivisection, which gained wide acceptance with Descartes's view of animals as machines, would be an example of this failure. He was an advocate of animal rights and defended an environmental ethic.
The author of The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984), Sprigge defended a panpsychist version of absolute idealism, according to which reality consists of bits of experience combined into a certain kind of coherent whole. His work presents several new arguments in favor of the plausibility of such an account. He also defended a version of determinism in which all moments of time are intrinsically present and only relatively past or future. Time is unreal, he argued. What we experience as temporal transition is an illusion. Though a skeptic of traditional theism, Sprigge considered himself a believer in an impersonal God. He would eventually become a Unitarian. In his last book, The God of Metaphysics (2006), he argued for the existence of a "God of Philosophers" worthy of worship. [2] Sprigge's metaphysics is a creative synthesis of Spinoza, F. H. Bradley, William James, George Santayana and Alfred North Whitehead. Because of his metaphysical monism, panpsychism and rigid determinism, he has been referred to as "Spinoza reincarnated in the twentieth century". [3]
A Festschrift for Sprigge appeared on the day he died, Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge (Ontos Verlag).
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1991 to 1992 and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The Timothy Sprigge Room at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh contains Sprigge's library. The Sprigge Archive is located at the Edinburgh University Library.
Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.
Idealism in philosophy, also known as philosophical idealism or metaphysical idealism, is the set of metaphysical perspectives asserting that, most fundamentally, reality is equivalent to mind, spirit, or consciousness; that reality is entirely a mental construct; or that ideas are the highest form of reality or have the greatest claim to being considered "real". The radical latter view is often first credited to the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato as part of a theory now known as Platonic idealism. Besides in Western philosophy, idealism also appears in some Indian philosophy, namely in Vedanta, one of the orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, and in some streams of Buddhism.
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Pantheism is the philosophical religious belief that reality, the universe and the cosmos are identical to divinity and a supreme being or entity. The physical universe is thus understood as an immanent deity, still expanding and creating, which has existed since the beginning of time. The term 'pantheist' designates one who holds both that everything constitutes a unity and that this unity is divine, consisting of an all-encompassing, manifested god or goddess. All astronomical objects are thence viewed as parts of a sole deity.
German idealism is a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment.
Naturalistic pantheism, also known as scientific pantheism, is a form of pantheism. It has been used in various ways such as to relate God or divinity with concrete things, determinism, or the substance of the universe. God, from these perspectives, is seen as the aggregate of all unified natural phenomena. The phrase has often been associated with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, although academics differ on how it is used. Natural pantheists don’t believe in any God, though they do worship the universe as if it was one. They believe in science, hence the name scientific pantheist, instead of a deity.
A subset of absolute idealism, British idealism was a philosophical movement that was influential in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The leading figures in the movement were T. H. Green (1836–1882), F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923). They were succeeded by the second generation of J. H. Muirhead (1855–1940), J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925), H. H. Joachim (1868–1938), A. E. Taylor (1869–1945), and R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943). The last major figure in the tradition was G. R. G. Mure (1893–1979). Doctrines of early British idealism so provoked the young Cambridge philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell that they began a new philosophical tradition, analytic philosophy.
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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to metaphysics:
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