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Philosophical Studies
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
- GenresPhilosophy
348 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1922
About the author
G.E. Moore
68 books88 followersGeorge Edward "G. E." Moore OM, FBA was an English philosopher, one of the founders of the analytic tradition along with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and (before them) Gottlob Frege. With Russell, he led the turn away from idealism in British philosophy, and became well known for his advocacy of common sense concepts, his contributions to ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, and "his exceptional personality and moral character." He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, highly influential among (though not a member of) the Bloomsbury Group, and the editor of the influential journal Mind. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1918. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the intellectual secret society, from 1894, and the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club.
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January 16, 2014... from E. Jordan's review (1924) "Professor Moore's refutation would therefore have been important if it had relegated the mental state to its properly obscure place; but that would have contributed, not to a refutation of idealism, but to the necessity of a re-examination of the assumptions of realism. ... From the point of view of the problem of knowledge it appears very curious why one who is so interested to prove the independent existence of at least some non-mental elements should be nevertheless continuously occupied with mental states. The description of the mechanisms of perception and the analysis of the nature of sense data hardly seem the procedure through which the proof of the non-mental character of even some reals would be expected." (90)
... from John Laird's review (1923) "Philosophy may be pursued in many fashions, but two of these fashions seem dominant in their importance. The first of these, by an elaborately circular argument, tries to convert hypothesis into fact by making it big enough to support everything. The second, with infinite pertinacity seeks to find somiething which a reasonable man dare not dispute. Both ways have their disappointments. The first, to mention one point only, seems often to perplex the plainest questions without being able to deny their pertinence. The second may seem so preoccupied with its base that it has no time to operate from the base. We are older, now, than Descartes was, and less confident of our ability to reconstruct the sciences if only we discover a certain foundation. Yet the man who cannot learn from the second method has no philosophy in him. I do not say that we should all follow it. Each of us, I suppose, should go on in his own way. What I say is that we can all learn from it, and this is another way of saying that we have all a vast deal to learn from Mr. Moore."
... from James Pratt's review "Mr. Moore's Realism" (1923) "The extent to which Mr. Moore's view has been modified since 1903 is thus rather striking. The changes are due, of course, to the seventeen years of very honest and hard thinking that Mr. Moore has given to the subject. Abandoning, for good and solid reasons, a form of realism which seemed in many ways closely related to that of Professor Alexander and of Professor Laird, Mr. Moore now speaks of sense data in a way which comes very near to admitting them to be subjective; he holds to a representative theory of knowledge and perception; and he asserts that we perceive material objects through the sense-data which resemble them or take their source from them." (384)
... from John Laird's review (1923) "Philosophy may be pursued in many fashions, but two of these fashions seem dominant in their importance. The first of these, by an elaborately circular argument, tries to convert hypothesis into fact by making it big enough to support everything. The second, with infinite pertinacity seeks to find somiething which a reasonable man dare not dispute. Both ways have their disappointments. The first, to mention one point only, seems often to perplex the plainest questions without being able to deny their pertinence. The second may seem so preoccupied with its base that it has no time to operate from the base. We are older, now, than Descartes was, and less confident of our ability to reconstruct the sciences if only we discover a certain foundation. Yet the man who cannot learn from the second method has no philosophy in him. I do not say that we should all follow it. Each of us, I suppose, should go on in his own way. What I say is that we can all learn from it, and this is another way of saying that we have all a vast deal to learn from Mr. Moore."
... from James Pratt's review "Mr. Moore's Realism" (1923) "The extent to which Mr. Moore's view has been modified since 1903 is thus rather striking. The changes are due, of course, to the seventeen years of very honest and hard thinking that Mr. Moore has given to the subject. Abandoning, for good and solid reasons, a form of realism which seemed in many ways closely related to that of Professor Alexander and of Professor Laird, Mr. Moore now speaks of sense data in a way which comes very near to admitting them to be subjective; he holds to a representative theory of knowledge and perception; and he asserts that we perceive material objects through the sense-data which resemble them or take their source from them." (384)
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