G.E. Moore

1873-1958 · British · Ethics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Perception, Foundations of Analytic Philosophy

The question of what is good is the most fundamental question in all of ethics.

When G.E. Moore arrived at Cambridge in the 1890s, British philosophy was dominated by idealism — the doctrine that reality is mind-dependent. Moore refused it. His 1903 "Refutation of Idealism" argued that perceiving blue and the blue itself are two distinct things; the idealist formula esse is percipi — to be is to be perceived — conflates them. That argument, alongside Russell's, became the founding move of analytic philosophy.

Topics G.E. Moore addresses

• the naturalistic fallacy
• the open-question argument
• goodness as a simple, indefinable, non-natural property
• ideal utilitarianism
• the principle of organic unities
• friendship and aesthetic experience as highest goods
• the refutation of idealism
• esse is percipi
• the act and object distinction
• pure realism
• the break with British idealism
• common-sense propositions
• truisms
• here is one hand
• proof of an external world
• anti-skepticism
• sense-data theory
• direct realism
• the paradox of analysis
• Moore's paradox
• p but I do not believe p
• the analysis question
• Bradley and McTaggart as idealist opponents
• the Bloomsbury Group reception

Converse with G.E. Moore on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in G.E. Moore's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.