Abstract

F.H. Bradley always said that understanding his views requires understanding the importance of immediate experience, and in a recent paper in Bradley Studies, entitled, “F. H. Bradley and the Doctrine of Immediate Experience,” Dr. Sievers offers an important new study of this topic. His analysis lists eleven characteristics, each of which is, presumably, like the first on the list, an “important characteristic of feeling or immediate experience”. This list, and the title of the paper, suggest that there is a fairly univocal sense of immediacy available in Bradley’s texts. On the one hand this has to be true, for an immediate experience of any type will necessarily display whatever characteristics differentiate it from experiences which are not immediate. On the other hand, Bradley’s discussions sometimes suggest that there are different types of immediate experience or feeling, that experiences can be immediate in more than one sense. If this is true, we need an analysis of these various senses of immediacy as a supplement to Dr. Sievers’ account.