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

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.