IDEALISM: DEFINITIONS
Idealism asserts either that only minds and the objects of mind exist, or that everything is composed of mental realities (e.g., thoughts, feelings, perceptions, ideas, or will). It is the view, in other words, that ideas, or thought, make up either the whole or an indispensable aspect of any full reality, so that a world of material objects containing no thought either could not exist or would not be fully 'real.'
Neo-Kantianism refers to schools of thought inspired by Kant.
Transcendental Idealism is the view, derived from Kant, that our experience of things is about how they appear to us as a result of the nature of our cognitive processes, not about those things as they are in and of themselves.
Neo-Hegelianism refers to schools of thought inspired by Hegel.
Absolute Idealism is the view, derived from Hegel, that being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole in which subject (the knower, thought) and object (the known, being) are identical in that they share a common dynamic ground: geist or 'spirit' in the process of developing in ever greater complexity.
British Idealism: does not refer to all idealist philosophers who happened to be British (e.g. Berkeley), but rather to a philosophical movement that was influential in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The leading figures in the movement were T. H. Green (1836-1882), F. H. Bradley (1846-1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923). They were succeeded by the second generation of J. M. E. McTaggart, H. H. Joachim, J. H. Muirhead, and G. R. G. Mure. The doctrines of British idealism so provoked the young Cambridge philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell that they gave birth to Analytic philosophy. Though much more variegated than some commentaries would seem to suggest, British idealism was generally marked by several broad tendencies: a belief in an Absolute (a single all-encompassing reality that in some sense formed a coherent and all-inclusive system); the assignment of a high place to reason as both the faculty by which the Absolute's structure is grasped and as that structure itself; and a fundamental unwillingness to accept a dichotomy between thought and object, reality consisting of thought-and-object together in a strongly coherent unity. British idealism largely developed from the German Idealist movement -- particularly such philosophers as Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. British idealism was influenced by Hegel at least in broad outline, and undeniably adopted some of Hegel's terminology and doctrines. Examples include not only the aforementioned Absolute, but also a doctrine of internal relations, a coherence theory of truth, and a concept of a concrete universal. However, none of the British idealists adopted Hegel's philosophy wholesale, and his most significant writings on logic seem to have found no purchase whatsoever in their thought (nor in British thought generally). On its political side, the British idealists were largely concerned to refute what they regarded as a brittle and "atomistic" form of individualism, as espoused by e.g. Herbert Spencer. In their view, humans are fundamentally social beings in a manner and to a degree not adequately recognized by Spencer and his followers. The British Idealists did not, however, reify the State in the manner that Hegel apparently did; Green in particular spoke of the individual as the sole locus of value and contended that the State's existence was justified only insofar as it contributed to the realization of value in the lives of individual persons.
