Timothy L. S. Sprigge
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Timothy L.S. Sprigge (born 1932) is a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at the University of Edinburgh, where he is an Emeritus Professor. Long concerned with the nature of experience and the relation 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?"
The author of The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984), Sprigge defends 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.
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1991 to 1992.
Also a defender of animal rights, he espouses a broadly utilitarian ethics (which he defends in The Rational Foundation of Ethics). Sprigge is also interested in the ideas of the philosophers Bradley, William James and Santayana.
