Western Philosophy 19th-century philosophy, 20th-century philosophy
George Edward Moore
Name: George Edward Moore
Birth: November 4, 1873
Death: October 24, 1958
School/tradition: Analytic philosophy
Main interests
Ethics, Philosophy of Language, Epistemology
Notable ideas
Naturalistic fallacy, Moore's paradox
Influences	Influenced
Gottlob Frege, F. H. Bradley, John McTaggart	Bertrand Russell Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin

George Edward Moore, usually known as G.E. Moore, (November 4, 1873 – October 24, 1958) was a distinguished and hugely influential English philosopher who was educated and taught at the University of Cambridge. He was, with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and (before them) Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of the Analytic tradition in philosophy. In the 18th century the philosophies of The Enlightenment would begin to have dramatic effect, and the landmark works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have an electrifying effect on a new generation of thinkers. ... The 20th century brought with it upheavals that produced a series of conflicting developments within philosophy over the basis of knowledge and the validity of various absolutes. ... George Edward Moore source: http://www. ... November 4 is the 308th day of the year (309th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 57 days remaining. ... 1873 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calaber). ... October 24 is the 297th day of the year (298th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 68 days remaining. ... 1958 (MCMLVIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical movement in University philosophy departments in English-speaking countries, although one of its founders, Gottlob Frege, was German, and many of its leading proponents, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel and Karl Popper, were Austrian. ... Ethics (from Greek ἦθος meaning custom) is the branch of axiology, one of the four major branches of philosophy, which attempts to understand the nature of morality; to define that which is right from that which is wrong. ... Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that studies language. ... Epistemology is an analytic branch of philosophy which studies the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge. ... George E. Moore The naturalistic fallacy is an alleged logical fallacy, identified by British philosopher G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica (1903), which Moore stated was committed whenever a philosopher attempts to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term good in terms of one... G. E. Moore remarked once in a lecture on the peculiar inconsistency involved in saying something like Its raining outside but I dont believe that it is. ... Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848, Wismar – 26 July 1925, Bad Kleinen) was a German mathematician who evolved into a logician and philosopher. ... Francis Herbert Bradley (30 January 1846 – 18 September 1924) was a British philosopher. ... John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) was the leading Hegel scholar in England at the beginning of the 20th century. ... Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was an influential British logician, philosopher, and mathematician, working mostly in the 20th century. ... Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (IPA: ) (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking works to modern philosophy, primarily on the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. ... John Langshaw Austin (March 28, 1911 - February 8, 1960) was a philosopher of language, who developed much of the current theory of speech acts. ... November 4 is the 308th day of the year (309th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 57 days remaining. ... 1873 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calaber). ... October 24 is the 297th day of the year (298th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 68 days remaining. ... 1958 (MCMLVIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ... The University of Cambridge, located in Cambridge, England, is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was an influential British logician, philosopher, and mathematician, working mostly in the 20th century. ... Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (IPA: ) (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking works to modern philosophy, primarily on the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. ... Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848, Wismar – 26 July 1925, Bad Kleinen) was a German mathematician who evolved into a logician and philosopher. ... Analytic philosophy is the dominant philosophical movement in University philosophy departments in English-speaking countries, although one of its founders, Gottlob Frege, was German, and many of its leading proponents, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Gödel and Karl Popper, were Austrian. ...

Moore is best known today for his defense of ethical non-naturalism, his emphasis on common sense in philosophical method, and the paradox which bears his name. He was admired by and influential among other philosophers, and also by the Bloomsbury Group, but (unlike his friend and colleague Russell) mostly unknown today outside of academic philosophy. Moore's essays are known for his clear, circumspect writing style, and for his methodical and patient approach to philosophical problems. Among his most famous works are his book Principia Ethica, and his essays, "The Refutation of Idealism", "A Defence of Common Sense", and "A Proof of the External World". This article needs cleanup. ... Look up Common sense in Wiktionary, the free dictionary For the American independence advocacy pamphlet by Thomas Paine, see Common Sense (pamphlet) For the American hip-hop artist, see Common One meaning of the term common sense (or as an adjective, commonsense) on a strict construction of the term, is... G. E. Moore remarked once in a lecture on the peculiar inconsistency involved in saying something like Its raining outside but I dont believe that it is. ... The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set or just Bloomsbury, as its adherents (members is probably too formal a designation) would generally refer to it, was an English group of artists and scholars that existed from around 1905 until around World War II. // History The group began as an informal social... A Defence of Common Sense is an essay by the philosopher G. E. Moore. ...

G.E. Moore died on October 24, 1958 and was interred in the Burial Ground of Parish of the Ascension, Cambridge, England. The poet Nicholas Moore and the composer Timothy Moore were his sons. He was an important member of the secretive Cambridge Apostles, and his life was written by Paul Levy, in Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (1979). October 24 is the 297th day of the year (298th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 68 days remaining. ... 1958 (MCMLVIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Map of the Cambridgeshire area (1904) The city of Cambridge is an old English university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Nicholas Moore (16 November 1918 – 1986) was an English poet, associated with the New Apocalyptics in the 1940s, who later dropped out of the literary world. ... Trinity College Great Court. ... Paul Pierre Lévy (September 15, 1886 - December 15, 1971) was a French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introduced martingales and Lévy flights. ...

Ethics

Moore is also well-known for the so-called "open question argument," which is contained in his (also greatly influential) Principia Ethica. The Principia is one of the main inspirations of the movement against ethical naturalism (see ethical non-naturalism) and is partly responsible for the twentieth-century concern with meta-ethics. The naturalistic fallacy is an alleged logical fallacy concerning the semantics and metaphysics of ethical value. ... Naturalism, sometimes also called definism, is a theory in meta-ethics that holds that ethical terms can be defined; the meaning of ethical sentences can be given in totally non-ethical terms. ... This article needs cleanup. ... In philosophy, meta-ethics is the branch of ethics that seeks to understand the nature of ethical properties (if there are any), and ethical statements, attitudes, and judgments. ...

The Naturalistic Fallacy

Moore charged that most other philosophers who worked in ethics had made a mistake he called the "Naturalistic fallacy". The business of ethics, Moore agreed, is to discover the qualities that make things good. So, for example, hedonists about value claim that the quality being pleasant is what makes things good; other theorists could claim that complexity is what makes things good. With this project Moore has no quarrel. What he objects to is the idea that, in telling us the qualities that make things good, ethical theorists have thereby given us an analysis of the term 'good' and the property goodness. Moore regards this as a serious confusion. To take an example, a hedonist might be right to claim that something is good just in case it is pleasant. But this does not mean, Moore wants to insist, that we can define value in terms of pleasure. Telling us what qualities make things valuable is one thing; analyzing value is quite another. George E. Moore The naturalistic fallacy is an alleged logical fallacy, identified by British philosopher G.E. Moore in Principia Ethica (1903), which Moore stated was committed whenever a philosopher attempts to prove a claim about ethics by appealing to a definition of the term good in terms of one... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ...

Moore also enjoyed spending time at the zoo on weekends. In his essay about the Naturalistic Fallacy, he slipped in a prophetic reference to the rise of the pop group The Beatles. This foretelling of the future is a little known and almost never recognized historical fact.

Open Question Argument

Main article: Open Question Argument

Moore's argument for the indefinability of “good” (and thus for the fallaciousness of the “naturalistic fallacy”) is often called the Open Question Argument; it is presented in §13 of Principia Ethica. The argument hinges on the nature of statements such as "Anything that is pleasant is also good" and the possibility of asking questions such as "Is it good that x is pleasant?" According to Moore, these questions are open and these statements are significant; and they will remain so no matter what is substituted for "pleasure". Moore concludes from this that any analysis of value is bound to fail. In other words, if value could be analyzed, then such questions and statements would be trivial and obvious. Since they are anything but trivial and obvious, value must be indefinable. Critics of Moore's arguments sometimes claim that he is appealing to general puzzles concerning analysis (cf. the paradox of analysis), rather than revealing anything special about value. Other responses appeal to the Fregean distinction between sense and reference, allowing that value concepts are special and sui generis, but insisting that value properties are nothing but natural properties (this strategy is similar to that taken by non-reductive materialists in philosophy of mind). The naturalistic fallacy is an alleged logical fallacy concerning the semantics and metaphysics of ethical value. ... The naturalistic fallacy is an alleged logical fallacy concerning the semantics and metaphysics of ethical value. ... Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (November 8, 1848 - July 26, 1925) was a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is regarded as a founder of both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. ... The distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung (usually but not always translated sense and reference, respectively) was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in his 1892 paper Ãœber Sinn und Bedeutung (On Sense and Reference), which is still widely read today. ... Actually, the suggestion is that we keep this article title as about physicalism generally (as described in the 2 paragraphs below) and split/merge the rest of the content into articles about physicalism in philosophy of mind. ... Philosophy of mind is the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, and consciousness. ...

Good as indefinable

Moore contended that goodness cannot be analyzed in terms of any other property. In Principia Ethica, he writes:

It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not "other," but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. (§ 10 ¶ 3)

Therefore, the only definition we can give of "good" is an ostensive one; that is, we can only point to an action or a thing and say "That is good." Similarly, we cannot describe to a blind man exactly what yellow is. We can only show a sighted man a piece of yellow paper or a yellow scrap of cloth and say "That is yellow." An ostensive definition conveys the meaning of a term by pointing out examples of what is defined by it. ...

Good as a non-natural property

In addition to categorizing "good" as indefinable, Moore also emphasized that it is a non-natural property. That is, two objects that are qualitatively identical cannot have different values. There cannot be two yellow shirts that are identical in every way (same shade of yellow, made at the same factory, the same brand name, the same style, etc...) except for their reception of the predication of "good" (one cannot be good and the other not good). An object's property of "good" is determined by what other properties the object has. It is a property that is a product of having other properties. Therefore, if two objects are qualitatively identical, they must have the same value of "good". In philosophy, it is important to distinguish between two senses of identity, qualitative identity and numerical identity. ...

Moral knowledge

To support his proposed arguments, Moore contended that man has a "moral intuition" that helps him locate what exactly is "good". In this he was a follower of Ethical intuitionism. This article needs cleanup. ...

Proof of an External World

One of the most important parts of Moore's philosophical development was his break from the idealism that dominated British philosophy (as represented in the works of his former teachers F. H. Bradley and John McTaggart), and his defense of what he regarded as a "common sense" form of realism. In his 1925 essay "A Defence of Common Sense" he argued against idealism and skepticism toward the external world on the grounds that they could not give reasons to accept their metaphysical premises that were more plausible than the reasons we have to accept the common sense claims about our knowledge of the world that skeptics and idealists must deny. He famously put the point into dramatic relief with his 1939 essay "Proof of an External World", in which he gave a common sense argument against skepticism by raising his right hand and saying "Here is one hand," and then raising his left and saying "And here is another," then concluding that there are at least two external objects in the world, and therefore that he knows (by this argument) that an external world exists. Not surprisingly, not everyone inclined to skeptical doubts found Moore's method of argument entirely convincing; Moore, however, defends his argument on the grounds that skeptical arguments seem invariably to require an appeal to "philosophical intuitions" that we have considerably less reason to accept than we have for the common sense claims that they supposedly refute. (In addition to fueling Moore's own work, the "Here is one hand" argument also deeply influenced Wittgenstein, who spent his last weeks working out a new approach to Moore's argument in the remarks that were published posthumously as On Certainty.) Idealism is an approach to philosophical enquiry. ... Francis Herbert Bradley (30 January 1846 – 18 September 1924) was a British philosopher. ... John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866-1925) was the leading Hegel scholar in England at the beginning of the 20th century. ... Look up Common sense in Wiktionary, the free dictionary For the American independence advocacy pamphlet by Thomas Paine, see Common Sense (pamphlet) For the American hip-hop artist, see Common One meaning of the term common sense (or as an adjective, commonsense) on a strict construction of the term, is... Philosophical realism refers to various philosophically unrelated positions, in some cases diametrically opposed ones, which are termed realism. ... A Defence of Common Sense is an essay by the philosopher G. E. Moore. ... The neutrality of this article is disputed. ... Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (IPA: ) (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking works to modern philosophy, primarily on the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. ...

Language

Moore is also remembered for drawing attention to the peculiar inconsistency involved in uttering a sentence such as "It will rain but I don't believe that it will"--a puzzle which is now commonly called "Moore's paradox". The puzzle arises because it seems impossible for anyone to consistently assert such a sentence; but there doesn't seem to be any logical contradiction between "It will rain" and "I don't believe that it will rain". (Indeed, it is not unusual for such conjunctions to be true — for example, whenever I am wrong about the weather forecast.) G. E. Moore remarked once in a lecture on the peculiar inconsistency involved in saying something like Its raining outside but I dont believe that it is. ...

In addition to Moore's own work on the paradox, the puzzle also inspired a great deal of work by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who described the paradox as the most impressive philosophical insight that Moore had ever introduced. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (IPA: ) (April 26, 1889 – April 29, 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who contributed several ground-breaking works to modern philosophy, primarily on the foundations of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. ...

Organic Wholes

Moore’s description of the principle of organic unity is extremely straightforward; nonetheless, it is a principle that seems to have generally escaped ethical philosophers before his time:

The value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the values of its parts (Principia, § 18).

According to Moore, a moral actor cannot survey the “goodness” inherent in the various parts of a situation, assign a value to each of them, and then generate a sum in order to get an idea of its total value. A moral scenario is a complex assembly of parts, and its total value is often created by the relations between those parts, and not by their individual value. The organic metaphor is thus very appropriate: biological organisms seem to have emergent properties which cannot be found anywhere in their individual parts. For example, a human brain seems to exhibit a capacity for thought when none if its neurons exhibit any such capacity. In the same way, a moral scenario can have a value far greater than the sum of its component parts.

To understand the application of the organic principle to questions of value, it is perhaps best to consider Moore’s primary example, that of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object. To see how the principle works, a thinker engages in “reflective isolation”, the act of isolating a given concept in a kind of null-context and determining its intrinsic value. In our example, we can easily see that per sui, beautiful objects and consciousnesses are not particularly valuable things. They might have some value, but when we consider the total value of a consciousness experiencing a beautiful object, it seems to exceed the simple sum of these values (Principia 18:2).

Works Online

• G. E. Moore, "The Nature of Judgment" (1899)
• G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903)
• G. E. Moore, Review of Franz Brentano's The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong (1903)
• G. E. Moore, The Refutation of Idealism (1903)
• G. E. Moore, Ethics (1912)

External resources

• Summary of life and work of G. E. Moore at http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/moor.htm
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • G.E. Moore
  • G.E. Moore's Moral Philosophy

Books

• Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles by Paul Levy (1979), ISBN 9780030536168

• A Defense of Realism: Reflections on the Metaphysics of G. E. Moore by E.D. Klemke ISBN 1573927325

Paul Pierre Lévy (September 15, 1886 - December 15, 1971) was a French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introduced martingales and Lévy flights. ...

Sources

1. G.E. Moore, On Defining "Good," in Analytic Philosophy: Classic Readings, Stamford, CT: Wadsworth, 2002, pp.1-10. ISBN 0-534-51277-1.