G.E. Moore
G.E. Moore

British philosopher, co-founder — alongside Russell and Frege — of analytic philosophy. His critique of British idealism and his work in ethics decisively influenced the entire analytic tradition of the 20th century.

Key Concepts

  • Naturalistic fallacy: the error of defining the good in terms of natural properties (pleasure, evolution, desire). The good is simple, indefinable, and non-natural — it cannot be reduced to any empirical property. A central critique of utilitarianism and ethical naturalism
  • Open question argument: for any natural property X, it always makes sense to ask “Is X good?” — if the good were identical to X, the question would be absurd. This proves that good ≠ X
  • Moral intuitionism: fundamental moral values are known by direct intuition, not by inference or definition. Ethics is an autonomous science, not reducible to natural sciences
  • Common sense realism: against the idealism of Berkeley and Hegel — the external world exists independently of the mind. Defense of common sense realism as the philosophical starting point
  • Proof of the external world: “here is a hand, here is another” — he argues that we can prove the existence of the external world with more certainty than any abstract philosophical premise that denies it
  • Conceptual analysis: the central task of philosophy is analysis — decomposing complex concepts into their simpler, more precise components; the program that defines analytic philosophy
  • Intrinsic goods: certain states are good in themselves (friendship, beauty, knowledge) — independently of any consequence. A critique of hedonistic utilitarianism

Influenced by

  • Kant — deontological ethics and moral autonomy
  • Russell — analytic program (mutual influence)
  • Sidgwick — British moral intuitionism

Influenced

  • Russell and Wittgenstein — analytic philosophy
  • Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Keynes) — ethics and aesthetics
  • Contemporary metaethics (intuitionism, moral realism)
  • Karl Popper — theory of knowledge

Works

Principia Ethica (1903); Ethics (1912); Philosophical Studies (1922); Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953).

See also

Twentieth-Century Philosophy

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