G. E. Moore

George Edward Moore was one of the giants in the formation of analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world. During most of his professional life, he was affiliated with Cambridge University---as a student and as a fellow at Trinity College, from 1892 to 1896 and from 1898 to 1904, respectively; as a university lecturer from 1911 to 1925; as a professor of mental philosophy and logic from 1925 until his retirement in 1939. Moore's philosophical contributions touch on three areas: philosophical method, moral philosophy, and theory of knowledge. His philosophical method is exhibited in his unrelenting effort to discover and elucidate the meanings of philosophical concepts and in his appeal to common sense. This method is evident in his work in ethics and epistemology. Principia Ethica (1903) established him as the foremost critic of ethical naturalism; his conceptions of goodness as an indefinable quality and of intrinsic value as organic unity were influential not only in philosophical circles but also among the artists and writers of the Bloomsbury group. Moore's work in epistemology was expressed in a large number of articles distinguished for their nicety of analysis. They span six decades, revealing a thinker who moved out of idealism into realism and then moved back and forth among the varieties of realism on such questions as the status of sense data, that is, whether they exist, and if they exist, whether they are physical parts of things or are mental representations only.