Abstract
Moore made his philosophical discoveries, well known from Principia Ethica and Philosophical Studies, step by step. In the summer of 1895 he spent five weeks in Tübingen, Germany, attending Otto Crusius’s lectures on Plato, and Christoph Sigwart’s lectures on Kant.1 The effect of this visit was that Kant became Moore’s philosophical ‘indoctrinator in default’. This is clearly to be seen in his two Dissertations (1897, 1898a), which investigated Kant’s ethics. Roughly, Moore borrowed from Kant some elements of philosophical logic which he revised radically.
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Moore was introduced to Crusius through a letter from James Ward. It is characteristic of the difference between the initial philosophical intuitions of Russell and Moore that despite Alys’s (Russell’s wife’s) insistence on Tübingen (see Russell 1992a, p. 58), in the same summer of 1895 Russell studied in Berlin: Economics between January and March (it is from that time that his ‘Tiergarten Project’, and also his project for ‘philosophy of geometry’ came out), and between November and December German Social Democracy.
The first apparently were Russell’s lectures on philosophy of mathematics delivered in 1901.
To be sure, analysis, as is well known from Plato and Descartes, was always used in philosophy as a means for criticising what is not real. On this point see Milkov 1997a, i, pp. 58–65.
Quoted according to Baldwin 1990, p. 3.
A remark of Ward’s on the second chapter of the 1898 Dissertation.
See on this qualification Milkov 1997a, i, pp. 80–2.
A notable exception is Kovesi 1984.
See his letter to Meinong of 15 December 1904 (Meinong 1965, p. 151).
It is of interest for our analysis that Russell accepted a similar ‘organicism’—that of sums, with the most notable example propositions as opposed to aggregates (see Russell 1903a, § 136).
Moore accepted this principle for the first time in the Apostlic paper ‘Should Things be Real?’ (1900b) when he declared: ‘It is impossible to tell in isolation whether a thing is good or bad’ (1979, p. 214).
In Regulae Descartes’s instruction in this respect was to make enumeration so complete and reviews so general that we should be certain of having omitted nothing (see Descartes 1964/74, x, pp. 388–92).
In June 1912 he wrote to Russell: ‘I have just been reading a part of Moore’s Principia Ethica: (now please don’t be shocked) I do not like it at all…. I don’t believe that it can dream of comparing with Frege’s or your own works’ (Wittgenstein 1974a, p. 9).
A belief disproved by Russell in 1905—a disproof Moore reluctantly accepted in his lectures Some Main Problems of Philosophy [1910–11], and eventually, in ‘Russell’s “Theory of Descriptions”’ (1944), cast aside.
Here it should be noted that already in ‘Amantium querellae (sic)’ (1898c), read in November 1898, Moore defends the thesis that love ‘differs in degree, and in no very marked degree, from ordinary friendship’ (1979, p. 202).
This concept is important since it was an intermediate step towards the introduction of the term ‘sense-data’ four years later. See on this Milkov 2001d.
This point disproves Michael Dummett’s thesis that ‘for none of the various groups and individuals’ criticised in E. Gellner’s work Words and Things (Gellner 1959) ‘does any of their work depend upon their theory of the nature of philosophy’ (Dummen 1960a, p. 434).
This point of Moore’s, accepted also by Russell and partly also by Wittgenstein, was later criticised by the Oxford School of the mid-1950s, but accepted by Strawson in his Individuals.
Despite some later claims (see Price 1945), for Moore ‘clarity is not enough’.
August Messer was a German phenomenologist of the first half of the century. In the review, Moore pronounced his book ‘extraordinarily good’ ( 1910, p. 395 ).
On the similarities between Moore’s lectures and phenomenology see Künne 1991, and Milkov 2001c.
This conception was developed in full in Russell 1914b, pp. 116 ff.
Moore abandoned this position in ‘Is Existence a Predicate?’ (1936).
Preparing Principia Ethica, Moore declared: ‘[I] found, in Brentano’s “The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong”, opinions far more closely resembling my own, than those of any other ethical writer with whom I am acquainted’ (1903b, pp. x–xi). He was critical only of Brentano’s neglect of truth-functionalism and his open acceptance of the concepts of right and wrong as ultimate values in both ethics and aesthetics (see 1903a, p. 117 ).
Here Moore opposes Frege’s idea (from 1891–2) of truth-values as objects, already criticised by Russell in The Principles of Mathematics, § 479.
It is this deflationary theory of truth which was adopted by Ramsey in ‘Facts and Propositions’ [1927], and later by Strawson in ‘Truth’ (Strawson 1949). See p. 34 n. 2.
Cf. Heidegger’s anti-apophantical theory of truth according to which ‘we call True not only a sentence, but also a thing, true gold as different from false gold[, for example]’ (Heidegger 1950, p. 35).
Apparently, it was this theory that was further developed by Wittgenstein in ‘Notes Dictated to G. E. Moore’ as follows: ‘In “aRb”, “R” is not a symbol, but that “R” is between one name and another symbolizes’ (Wittgenstein 19796, p. 109). See ch. 3, § 2, (iii).
An understanding recently criticised in Lewis 1991.
Cf. Wittgenstein’s conception of ‘family resemblance’ (Wittgenstein 1953, § 67).
Hintikka has called such statements ‘doxastically indefensible’ (see Hintikka 1973, p. 71).
Moore’s argument on this point is very interesting. To him, ‘the thing is perfectly ridiculous, as soon as you look at it’ (1933, p. 107). This, in fact, is strikingly similar to Wittgenstein’s ‘Don’t think, but look’ (Wittgenstein 1953, § 66), which, incidentally, dates from 1936 (MS152, p. 68), i.e. after this remark of Moore’s had been made.
This argument against names was recently used in Rorty 1979, p. 292.
A point developed later in Strawson 1952, and Strawson I974b.
For example, in ‘The Conception of Reality’ (1917), where Moore points out against Bradley ‘that the terms “real” and “unreal” cannot… be properly said to stand for any conception whatever’ (p. 212). They can’t mean that something has, or has not, a particular property. What the proposition ‘Lions are real’ states is: (a) the conception ‘being a lion’; (b) the conception of ‘belonging to something’.
This point is developed in full in Moore’s paper ‘Russell’s “Theory of Descriptions”’ (1944).
This is Moore’s variant of the ‘ontological argument’. Incidentally, the paper ‘Is Existence a Predicate?’ is reprinted in the celebrated anthology on this argument, Plantinga 1965, pp. 71–85.
Here it is as if Moore follows Samuel Johnson from this passage: ‘Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it [Berkeley’s thesis that matter doesn’t exist] thus”’ (Boswell 1791, i, p. 471).
Incidentally, in 1939 Moore does not speak of indefinables but of pieces of conclusive evidence.
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Moore, G.E. (2003). The Project for a New Philosophy. In: A Hundred Years of English Philosophy. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 94. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0177-8_2
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