Bosanquet, Bernard

Bosanquet, Bernard (bō`zənkĭt), 1848–1923, English philosopher, educated at Oxford. He lectured there (1871–81) and at St. Andrews (1903–8). His major works include A History of Aesthetic (1892), The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899), and The Value and Destiny of the Individual (1913). They exemplify the idealists' discontent with British empiricism at the end of the 19th cent.

Bibliography

See biography by H. Bosanquet (1924); J. H. Muirhead, ed., Bernard Bosanquet and His Friends (1935).

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Bosanquet, Bernard

(born June 14, 1848, Alnwick, Northumberland, Eng.—died Feb. 8, 1923, London) British philosopher. He helped revive in Britain the absolute idealism of G.W.F. Hegel and sought to apply its principles to social and political problems. His debt to Hegel is most evident in his works on ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. His Some Suggestions in Ethics (1918) presents a view of reality as a synthesis in which traditional oppositions such as pleasure/duty and egoism/altruism are reconciled. His other works include Knowledge and Reality (1885), Logic (1888), and History of Aesthetic (1892). His idealism was attacked by G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell.

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Bosanquet, Bernard 

Born June 14,1848, in RockHall, Northumberland; died Feb. 8, 1923, in London. English neo-Hegelian philosopher.

Bosanquet carried on the line of absolutist idealism of F. H. Bradley, emphasizing the personal character of the “absolute,” the source of all values. In The Philosophical Theory of the State he developed a sociopolitical conception by which the “state” was understood as the embodiment of the general will, growing out of the cooperation of individuals, and the “solely recognized and justified constraint” (The Philosophical Theory of the State, London, 1899, p. 152), which was directed toward subordinating the personality to the “whole” and suppressing its “egoism,” which springs from the “animal nature” of man. Bosanquet criticized formal logic; he understood logical thought as a transition from fragmentary individual experience to the “concrete universal”—that is, to “truth as a whole.”

WORKS

Essentials of Logic. London, 1895.
A History of Aesthetics, 2nd ed. London-New York, 1904.
The Principle of Individuality and Value. London, 1912.
The Philosophical Theory of the State. London, 1920.
The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy. London, 1921.
In Russian translation:
Osnovaniia logiki. Moscow, 1914.

REFERENCES

Bogomolov, A. S. Anglo-amerikanskaia burzhuaznaia filosofiia epokhi imperializma, ch. 5. Moscow, 1964.
Houang, F. Le Néo-Hégélianisme en Angleterre: la philosophie de Bernard Bosanquet, 1848–1923. Paris, 1954.

A. S. BOGOMOLOV