5 - A System of Judgments

Summary

In his Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, the first book he published after his conversion to realism, Bertrand Russell compared Leibniz's cosmological argument for the existence of God with an argument of Bradley's. This is what Russell said about Bradley:

To maintain that there is no truth is self-contradictory, for if our contention were itself true, there would be truth. If, then, all truth consists in propositions about what exists, it is self-contradictory to maintain that nothing exists. Thus the existence of something is metaphysically necessary. This argument, which is set forth at length in Book I., Chaps. II.–IV. [“The Categorical and Hypothetical Forms of Judgment,” “The Negative Judgment,” and “The Disjunctive Judgment” respectively] of Mr Bradley's Logic, partakes of both the Ontological and Cosmological arguments.

(Russell 1937a, 177)

As with many of Russell's comments on Bradley, this one is both insightful and misleading. One of Russell's insights is that the chapters he mentions are parts of a single argument rather than a series of separate ones. Bradley treats categorical, hypothetical, negative, and disjunctive judgments as elements in a “system” of judgments. Another insight is that this system has metaphysical implications, implications that Bradley mentions despite his professed desire, expressed through much of The Principles of Logic, to avoid metaphysics. A final insight is that if Bradley's analysis of these different forms of judgment is correct, then indeed something must exist. None of these insights has been particularly obvious to Bradley's frequently bewildered readers.