Timothy Sprigge

Who was Timothy Sprigge?

Timothy L.S. Sprigge was a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and latterly an Emeritus Fellow.

Sprigge was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Bryanston in Dorset. He studied English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, then switched to philosophy, completing his PhD under A.J. Ayer.

Long concerned with the nature of experience and the relationship between mind and reality, Sprigge was the philosopher who first posed the question made famous by Thomas Nagel: "What is it like to be a bat?" Throughout his career he argued that physicalism or materialism is not only false, but has contributed to a distortion of our moral sense. There is, he argued, something non-physical to what a human being is and to animals of a higher sort.

The author of The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 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. Though a skeptic of traditional theism, Sprigge considered himself a believer in an impersonal God. He would eventually become a Unitarian. In his last book, The God of Metaphysics, he argued for the existence of a "God of Philosophers" worthy of worship. A Festschrift for Sprigge appeared on the day he died, Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge.