Blackwell Reference Online

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Reflecting on his long philosophical career, G. E. Moore had this to say:I do not think that the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world or the sciences.Yet this philosophers' philosopher was lionized by the Bloomsbury literati, and his first book, Principia Ethica, is now included by the Modern Library Board among the one hundred most important nonfiction books of the century.Born in 1873 to a middle-class family in a London suburb, Moore went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, at 19. After two years studying classics, he switched to philosophy under the influence of his friend Bertrand Russell, but soon after that it was Moore who led Russell from and against idealism. With “The Refutation of Idealism” Moore set the direction that was to take them both to logical and philosophical analysis, and to founding, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, the philosophical movement that came to be known as “analytic philosophy.”Moore's focus was not just on the giving of definitions or “analyses,” however, though that certainly was central to his work, as it was for Plato. On the contrary, he made it clear that it is also a job for philosophy to give “a general description of the whole of this universe, mentioning all ... log in or subscribe to read full text