Timothy Sprigge

Timothy Lauro Squire Sprigge (14 January 1932 – 11 July 2007), commonly cited as T. L. S. Sprigge, was a British idealist philosopher. He held the position of Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh and was later an Emeritus Fellow. Sprigge's philosophical inquiries centered on the nature of experience and the intricate relationship between mind and reality. He is notably recognized for posing the question, "What is it like to be a bat?", a query later popularized by Thomas Nagel. Throughout his career, Sprigge contended that physicalism and materialism were not only erroneous but also contributed to a distortion of moral understanding. He asserted that the failure to uphold the rights of both human and non-human animals stemmed from a metaphysical error: a misunderstanding of the true nature of consciousness and sentience from the first-person perspective. This perspective, he argued, was evident in practices like vivisection, which gained traction following Descartes's view of animals as mere machines. Consequently, Sprigge was a proponent of animal rights and advocated for an environmental ethic. His seminal work, *The Vindication of Absolute Idealism* (1984), defended a panpsychist interpretation of absolute idealism, proposing that reality comprises experiential units forming a coherent whole. He introduced novel arguments supporting this view. Sprigge also espoused a form of determinism, asserting the co-presence of all temporal moments and the illusory nature of temporal progression. Though skeptical of traditional theism, he believed in an impersonal God and eventually embraced Unitarianism. His final book, *The God of Metaphysics* (2006), explored the concept of a "God of Philosophers" worthy of reverence. Sprigge's metaphysical framework was a synthesis of ideas from Spinoza, F. H. Bradley, William James, George Santayana, and Alfred North Whitehead, leading to his description as "Spinoza reincarnated in the twentieth century" due to his metaphysical monism, panpsychism, and rigid determinism. A Festschrift in his honor, *Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge*, was published on the day of his death. He served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1991 to 1992 and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Timothy Sprigge Room at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, houses his library, and the Sprigge Archive is held at the Edinburgh University Library.