Timothy Sprigge

He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1991 to 1992 and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

The author of The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1984), 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. He also defended a version of determinism in which all moments of time are intrinsically present and only relatively past or future. Time is unreal, he argued. What we experience as temporal transition is an illusion. 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 (2006), he argued for the existence of a "God of Philosophers" worthy of worship. Sprigge's metaphysics is a creative synthesis of Spinoza, F. H. Bradley, William James, George Santayana and Alfred North Whitehead. Because of his metaphysical monism, panpsychism and rigid determinism, he has been called "Spinoza reincarnated in the twentieth century."

Sprigge was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Bryanston School in Dorset. He studied English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1952–1955), then switched to philosophy, completing his PhD under A. J. Ayer. He taught philosophy at University College, London and Sussex University before becoming Regius Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh.

Timothy Lauro Squire Sprigge (14 January 1932 – 11 July 2007), usually cited as T. 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.