George Edward Moore

views updated May 21 2018

George Edward Moore

The English philosopher George Edward Moore (1873-1958) was one of the originators of conceptual and linguistic analysis, the dominant trend in modern English philosophy.

Born on Nov. 4, 1873, in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London, G. E. Moore was the fifth of eight children in a cultivated family. After initial tutoring at home by his father, Moore was sent to a nearby day school, Dulwich College. There he pursued classical studies and music and formed the basis for his fine prose style. Excellence in these studies won him a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1892.

At Cambridge, Moore discovered philosophy and a wide circle of friends, Bertrand Russell introducing him to both. After completing his degree with a first, Moore won the annual fellowship prize with an essay on Immanuel Kant's ethics. The 6 years of leisure provided by the fellowship enabled Moore to break away from the idealism of J. M. E. McTaggart and F. H. Bradley and to begin to work out his own philosophical views. At the end of this period his first mature work, Principia Ethica (1903), was finished.

After a period of independent scholarship, supported by a comfortable inheritance, Moore was invited back to Cambridge in 1911 as a lecturer in psychology. In 1925 he became professor of philosophy there and held this post until his retirement in 1939. The extraordinary impact Moore had upon his students may be gathered from J. M. Keynes's delightful account in Two Memoirs (1949). After 1929 Moore attended Ludwig Wittgenstein's lectures and Wittgenstein attended Moore's; between them the two philosophers fundamentally altered the character of English philosophy.

Moore's work is essentially one of analysis and criticism. He has aptly characterized his interest in philosophy as follows: "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." He is thus a philosopher's philosopher. He taught his pupils patient and painstaking analysis of concepts, of claims, and, in particular, of their linguistic expression. Moore had a passion for clarity and propriety of usage; he also insisted on the rights of common sense, not as the ultimate norm but as one important basis for criticism, not to be lightly dismissed.

After retirement Moore lectured widely in the United States until 1944. He died on Oct. 24, 1958, in Cambridge, England. His principal works include Philosophical Studies (1922), Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953), and Philosophical Papers (1959).