Bernard Bosanquet

Bernard Bosanquet (born June 14, 1848, Alnwick, Northumberland, Eng.—died Feb. 8, 1923, London) philosopher who helped revive in England the idealism of G.W.F. Hegel and sought to apply its principles to social and political problems.

Made a fellow of University College, Oxford, in 1870, Bosanquet was a tutor there until 1881, when he moved to London to devote himself to philosophical writing and to work on behalf of the Charity Organisation Society. He was professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews University in Scotland (1903–08).

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Philosophy 101

Although Bosanquet owed much to Hegel, his first writings were influenced by the 19th-century German philosopher Rudolf Lotze, whose Logik and Metaphysik he had edited in English translation in 1884. The fundamental principles of such early works as Knowledge and Reality (1885) and Logic (1888) were further explicated in his Essentials of Logic (1895) and Implication and Linear Inference (1920), which stress the central role of logical thought in systematically addressing philosophical problems.

Bosanquet’s debt to Hegel is more evident in his works on ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Having translated in 1886 the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art, he proceeded to his own History of Aesthetic (1892) and Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915). Both reflect his belief that aesthetics can reconcile the natural and the supernatural worlds. As elsewhere in his work, Bosanquet revealed his distaste for the materialism of his day and favoured the neo-Hegelian antidote, which held that everything considered to be real is a manifestation of a spiritual absolute.

Bosanquet’s ethical and social philosophy, particularly the practical work Some Suggestions in Ethics (1918), shows a similar desire to view reality coherently, as a concrete unity in which pleasure and duty, egoism and altruism are reconciled. He asserted that the same passion shown by Plato for the unity of the universe reappeared in Christianity as the doctrine of the divine spirit manifesting itself in human society. Social life requires a communal will that both grows out of individual cooperation and maintains the individual in a state of freedom and social satisfaction. This view is expounded in Philosophical Theory of the State (1899) and in Social and International Ideals (1917).

Basing his metaphysics on Hegel’s concept of the dynamic quality of human knowledge and experience, Bosanquet emphasized the interrelated character of the content and the object of human thought. Thought, he wrote in Three Chapters on the Nature of Mind (1923), is “the development of connections” and “the sense of the whole.”

The popularity of Bosanquet’s views declined after intense criticism by the British philosophers G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.