Dialettica, esperienza, Assoluto. Studio sull'hegelismo di F. H. Bradley

The research project seeks to elucidate the nature and scope of Hegel’s influence on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, clarifying both the avenues through which Hegelian motifs enter into Bradley’s work and the ways in which they are reinterpreted, transformed, or resisted within the Oxford philosopher’s system. The study is conducted on the logical, psychological, and metaphysical levels, focusing respectively on the themes of (1) dialectic, (2) immediate experience, and (3) the Absolute. Beyond tracing such influence, the investigation tests the cogency of Bradley’s criticisms and evaluates the adequacy of his interpretation of the Hegelian text. The first section analyses Bradley’s construal of Hegelian dialectics, highlighting the anti-Hegelian tenor of his logic. Drawing on themes already circulating in the British reception of Hegel - such as McTaggart’s account of determinate negation as “reconstructive” and Green’s concern with epistemic limits - Bradley interprets dialectic as an inferential process grounded in negative judgment and ultimately referred to immediate experience as criterion of validity. On this basis, he contends that dialectic cannot secure a full correspondence between conceptual analysis and lived experience, and that Hegel’s identity of being and thought remains unattainable. The chapter reconstructs the concluding passages of the Principles to show this agnostic dimension of Bradley’s philosophy. The locus of Bradley’s most evident debt to Hegel lies in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. In both the Principles of Logic and essays in Mind, he explicitly refers to the Anthropology and Psychology, borrowing key traits for his doctrine of feeling. Conceived as pre-conceptual and unitary, Bradley’s notion of experience reproduces features Hegel attributes to Empfindung and Gefühl in the Encyclopaedia. The second part of the study compares these texts to assess the proximity of the two positions. Although several elements of Bradley’s view reappear substantially unchanged, their philosophical frameworks diverge. Feeling plays a foundational role in Bradley’s account of reality, whereas in Hegel’s system anthropological feeling retains a merely preliminary status. This divergence problematizes Bradley’s foundationalism and the very possibility of a genetic exposition of experience. The final section demonstrates that Bradley’s critique of relations stems in part from theses already present in Hegel: affinity with the chapter on perception in the Phenomenology of Spirit; consonance with Hegel’s critiques of intellectual abstraction, here reframed as the incapacity of the intellect to grasp unity from isolated terms; and explicit reference to the Science of Logic on the principle of identity. Yet decisive ruptures emerge: Bradley rejects Vernunft as the faculty that apprehends unity of opposites and concludes that thought cannot transcend the externality of its contents, a state that for Hegel characterizes Verstand. To clarify the implications of this separation of thought and reality, the analysis extends the comparison to the Absolute. Whereas Hegel conceives the Absolute as dynamic and processual, Bradley depicts it as a state of harmonic and eternal perfection, thus revealing the loss of the constitutive features of development in Hegel’s thought.