The Origin and Influence of G.E. Moore’s ‘The Nature of Judgment’

Abstract

G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell began their philosophical careers as undergraduates at Trinity College Cambridge in the late nineteenth century; but not as undergraduates studying Moral Science (as philosophy was then known). Moore went up to Trinity in 1892 to study Classics, and Russell, by then in his second year, was studying Mathematics. However both young men, recruited as desirable members by the select Cambridge Conversazione Society, were exposed to philosophical discussion and debate through the Society’s weekly meetings. At their undergraduate tutorials, as well as at Society meetings, they were introduced to various formulations of the British neo-Hegelianism that was dominant in the established philosophy of the period in the work, among others, of T.H. Green, RH. Bradley, and B. Bosanquet. The familiar version of the story of the rise of twentieth-century analytic philosophy in the early work of Russell and Moore is that their early incursions into philosophy were cultivated in this redoubtable neo-Hegelian atmosphere. Just before the turn of the century, however, Moore published ‘The Nature of Judgment’,² whose metaphysical doctrines had the unexpected effect of up-ending the established supremacy of nineteenth-century British idealism, and introduced what we now refer to as analytic philosophy.

I am grateful to Tom Baldwin, Kenneth Blackwell, Nick Griffin, and Gary Ostertag for discussion. All references to Griffin 1993 are to his introduction to the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, (vol. 2, vii–xxxix). Moore’s papers are archived in the Cambridge University Library Manuscripts Reading Room; I cite them by their classmark prefixes (Add. 8830 and 8875). Moore’s dissertation manuscripts are archived in the Trinity College Library, and published in Baldwin and Preti 2011.