This article articulates and defends F. H. Bradley's regress argument against external relations using contemporary analytic techniques and conceptuality. Bradley's argument is usually quickly dismissed as if it were beneath serious consideration. But I shall maintain that Bradley's argument, suitably reconstructed, is a powerful argument, plausibly premised, and free of such obvious fallacies as petitio principii. Thus it does not rest on the question-begging assumption that all relations are internal, as Russell, and more recently van Inwagen, maintain. Bradley does not attack external relations in order to affirm a doctrine of internal relations, and his monism is not derived from the internality of all relations, but from the self-contradictory nature of all relations. For Bradley, it is the "relational situation" as such that is ontologically defective.C. D. Broad once said of F. H. Bradley's famous regress argument against external relations that its use "would disgrace a child or a savage". 1 But some of us who are neither find the argument surprisingly resistant to refutation. 2 It is not a compelling argument, but then which argument for any interesting philosophical thesis is compelling? It is however a 'good' argument, indeed a powerful argument, plausibly premised, free of obvious fallacy, and worthy of very serious consideration. Or at least that is what I will be maintaining.
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