Work

“The Growth of Interest”. Richard Wollheim on F. H. Bradley's Moral Psychology

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This paper aims to reconstruct two key stages of Richard Wollheim's engagement with the moral psychology of F. H. Bradley—first in his 1959/1969 book on Bradley, and later in his 1993 collection of essays, The Mind and its Depths —and to connect them to Wollheim's own account of a dynamic moral psychology, as detailed in The Thread of Life (1984). Bradley's notion of “the growth of interest” is here reframed as growing up through learning to love and overcoming the pull of hate‐related impulses, such as envy. Finally, this paper highlights significant parallels between Wollheim's account and Iris Murdoch's concept of “the change of vision”, particularly as articulated in The Sovereignty of Good , thus situating both philosophers within a shared horizon of ethical transformation.

Source: European Journal of Philosophy

DOI: 10.1111/ejop.13073

Author: Paolo Babbiotti

Institution: University of Turin

Language: English

Topic: Philosophical Ethics and Theory

Subfield: Philosophy

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,240

Funders: Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca, Università degli Studi di Torino, Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca, NextGenerationEU