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RR 2011/254 Biographical Encyclopedia of British Idealism General Editor William Sweet Continuum London and New York, NY 2010 ISBN 978 0 8264 1865 4 xx + 724 pp. £150/$295
Keywords Encyclopedias, Philosophy, United Kingdom
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121111155923
Idealism (in one sense at least) sees the world through mind and spirit (i.e. they shape our understanding and experience of material things). It offers an alternative to the realistic view that material things exist independently of being perceived. Berkeley argued that things are mind-dependent, and later Kant and Fichte and Hegel engaged with this view, the last of these interested in how the mind works in human society. T.H. Green suggested that there was no given human experience, and that all experience implies intelligence. In this (simplistic here) way (leaving aside Plato, of course) we reach the idealism covered in this encyclopaedia: the main focus is from the early decades of the nineteenth century, through the twentieth until the present day. This is historically relevant because at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, idealism was very influential, not just in Britain but in the USA (along with pragmatism) and other English-speaking countries like Australia and India.
So we will expect to find, and do in fact find, philosophers and others like F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, John McTaggart and G.E. Moore, reflecting this "high-water-mark" period. But there is much more, widening out from these figures to the many others at the time and since - Collingwood and Creighton, Jowett and Oakeshott, Royce and Sidgwick, Spencer and Santayana. Alongside these runs at least two parallel strands of intellectuals - John Dewey and C.S. Peirce, Bertrand Russell and Croce, Temple and Toynbee, the Webbs - and writers like Arnold and Bradley, Carlyle and G.H. Lewes, Morris and Ruskin. These last were influenced by, and often influenced in their turn, the "idealist" philosophers who form the central thread of the encyclopaedia, and capture the ways in which idealist philosophy fed through into social theory and religious action. Some of the entries are as much theological as philosophical.
In a nutshell, then, the encyclopaedia under review sets out to represent the main idealist philosophers in Britain...