His work influenced but was later subject to criticism by many thinkers, notably Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

He gained first class honours in Classical Moderations (Greek and Latin), 1868, and in Literae Humaniores (a combination of philosophy and ancient history), 1870.

After graduation, he was elected to a Fellowship at University College, Oxford, but, after receiving a substantial inheritance upon the death of his father in 1880, resigned it in order to devote himself to philosophical research.

In his metaphysics, he is regarded as a key representative (with F. H. Bradley) of absolute idealism, although it is a term that he abandoned in favour of "speculative philosophy".

He was strongly influenced by Plato and Aristotle, but also by the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

"[4] The relationship between the individual and society was summarised in Bosanquet's preface to The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art (1886): Man's Freedom, in the sense thus contemplated, lies in the spiritual or supra-sensuous world by which his humanity is realized, and in which his will finds fulfilment.