Background
Joseph, Horace Wllliam Brindley was born on September 28, 1867 in Chatham.
Oxford (or Cook Wilsonian) realist
Joseph, Horace Wllliam Brindley was born on September 28, 1867 in Chatham.
Winchester College and New College, Oxford.
Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, New College. Oxford, 1899-1932.
Joseph was closely associated with Cook Wilson and Prichard and, with them, made up the school of Oxford realists of the early part of this century. It stood in much the same relation to the Oxford linguistic philosophy of the 1950s as did the simultaneous, and more important, realist school in Cambridge to the analytical philosophy of the 1930s and after. Joseph shared his colleagues’ predominantly critical standpoint and their first principles that knowledge is both unanalysable and self-intimating, and that it does not affect or modify its objects. All the same his late admission that he did not believe ‘either that there is a real world independent of mind altogether, or that my mind is independent of that mind of which the world is not independent; is really a reassertion of T. H. Green’s doctrine of the ‘eternal consciousness'. Joseph attacked formalism in logic, particularly in the new logic of Russell, and the accompanying idea that mathematics is the model of all thought. He argued hat cause and effect are internally related. He also attacked mechanistic conceptions of evolution. Organisms in general, and minds in particular, are not aggregates but wholes. In the same spirit he repudiated Prichard’s atomistic view of morality as a collection of duties. For Joseph it is a comprehensive form of life. Joseph was an assiduous and famously persevering teacher. Generations of students were pulverized by his aggressive ferocity. One who survived it was H. L. A. Hart, the delicacy and precision of whose reasoning owes something to his tutor, although his good sense is his own.