G. E. Moore
British philosopher
born Nov. 4, 1873, London, Eng.
died Oct. 24, 1958, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
Main
influential British Realist philosopher and professor whose
systematic approach to ethical problems and remarkably
meticulous approach to philosophy made him an outstanding
modern British thinker.
Elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in
1898, Moore remained there until 1904, during which time he
published several journal articles, including “The Nature of
Judgment” (1899) and “The Refutation of Idealism” (1903), as
well as his major ethical work, Principia Ethica (1903).
These writings were important in helping to undermine the
influence of Hegel and Kant on British philosophy. After
residence in Edinburgh and London, he returned to Cambridge
in 1911 to become a lecturer in moral science. From 1925 to
1939 he was professor of philosophy there, and from 1921 to
1947 he was editor of the philosophical journal Mind.
Though Moore grew up in a climate of evangelical
religiosity, he eventually became an agnostic. A friend of
Bertrand Russell, who first directed him to the study of
philosophy, he was also a leading figure in the Bloomsbury
group, a coterie that included the economist John Keynes and
the writers Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Because of his
view that “the good” is knowable by direct apprehension, he
became known as an “ethical intuitionist.” He claimed that
other efforts to decide what is “good,” such as analyses of
the concepts of approval or desire, which are not themselves
of an ethical nature, partake of a fallacy that he termed
the “naturalistic fallacy.”
Moore was also preoccupied with such problems as the
nature of sense perception and the existence of other minds
and material things. He was not as skeptical as those
philosophers who held that we lack sufficient data to prove
that objects exist outside our own minds, but he did believe
that proper philosophical proofs had not yet been devised to
overcome such objections.
Although few of Moore’s theories achieved general
acceptance, his unique approaches to certain problems and
his intellectual rigour helped change the texture of
philosophical discussion in England. His other major
writings include Philosophical Studies (1922) and Some Main
Problems of Philosophy (1953); posthumous publications were
Philosophical Papers (1959) and the Commonplace Book,
1919–1953 (1962).
