Note: the following article on Neo-Hegelianism and F.H. Bradley’s Absolute is a modified excerpt (pp. 53-56) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see the list on the main website.
Introduction
Neo-Hegelianism is the branch of idealism that is historically most pertinent to the Victorian era. As the name implies, this school of thought draws from the works of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Typical representatives of British Neo-Hegelianism were Hutcheson Stirling, in his The Secret of Hegel (1865), the brothers Edward and John Caird, in several works in the late Victorian era – such as An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1880) – and also F. H. Bradley, in works such as Appearance and Reality (1893) and Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).
(more…)