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. Throughout his career he argued that physicalism or materialism is not only false, but has contributed to a distortion of our moral sense. The failure to respect the rights of human beings and non-human animals is therefore largely a metaphysical error of failing to grasp the true reality of the first person, subjective perspective of consciousness, or sentience. The practice of vivisection, which gained wide acceptance with Descartes's view of
animals as machines, would be an example of this failure. He was an advocate of
animal rights and defended an environmental ethic. 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 referred to as "Spinoza reincarnated in the twentieth century". A
Festschrift for Sprigge appeared on the day he died,
Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge (Ontos Verlag). He was president of the
Aristotelian Society from 1991 to 1992 and Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh. The Timothy Sprigge Room at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh contains Sprigge's library. The Sprigge Archive is located at the Edinburgh University Library. ==Works==