- Timothy Sprigge
Timothy L.S. Sprigge (
January 14 ,1932 inLondon –July 11 ,2007 ) was a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at theUniversity of Edinburgh , where he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics and then an Emeritus Fellow. Long concerned with the nature ofexperience and the relation betweenmind andreality , Sprigge was the philosopher who first posed the question made famous byThomas Nagel : "What is it like to be a bat? "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. His last book - which appeared in 2006 - was entitled "The God of Metaphysics". A Festschrift for Sprigge appeared on the very 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 theRoyal Society of Edinburgh .Also a defender of
animal rights , he espoused a broadly utilitarianethics (which he defended in "The Rational Foundation of Ethics"). Sprigge was influenced by philosophers such asF. H. Bradley ,William James ,Alfred North Whitehead ,Josiah Royce andGeorge Santayana .Works
* "The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham" (1968)
* "Facts, Words and Beliefs. International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method" (1970)
* "Santayana: An examination of his philosophy (The Arguments of the philosophers)" (1974)
* "The Vindication of Absolute Idealism" (1984)
* "Theories of Existence" (1985)
* "The Rational Foundation of Ethics" (1988)
* "The significance of Spinoza's determinism (Mededelingen vanwege het SpinozahuiÌs)" (1989)
* "James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality" (1994)
* "The God of Metaphysics" (2006)External links
* [http://www.hist-analytic.org/Sprigge3.htm Career, bibliography, poems]
* [http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/documents/SPRIGGE-Obiturary.pdf Obituary by Leemon McHenry]
* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2161849,00.html "Guardian" obituary]
* [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2007/09/18/db1802.xml "Telegraph" obituary]
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