Moore, G(eorge) E(dward) 1873-1958
English empiricist philosopher

Born in London, he was educated at Dulwich College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where a fellow student, Bertrand Russell, helped persuade him to switch from classics to philosophy. After some years of private study in Edinburgh and London he returned to Cambridge to teach philosophy (1911) and became Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic (1925-39). After a brief, early infatuation with the prevailing Hegelian idealism of John M'Taggart and others, in 1903 he published an article 'The Refutation of Idealism' (in the journal Mind), and a book, the celebrated Principia Ethica ('Principal Ethics'). These marked an important change of direction and the effective revival, in a new form, of a British empiricist philosophical tradition, emphasizing in particular the intellectual virtues of clarity, precision and honesty, and identifying as a principal task of philosophy the analysis of ordinary concepts and arguments. Moore and Russell, and later their student Ludwig Wittgenstein, were the dominant figures in this tradition in the interwar years. Principia Ethica analysed the moral concept of goodness and commended the value of friendship and aesthetic experience; it was a major influence on the Bloomsbury Group, which included Leonard Woolf, Lowes Dickinson, John Maynard Keynes and E M Forster. Other works include Ethics (1916), an elaboration and restatement of these views, and three important collections of his influential articles and papers: Philosophical Studies (1922), Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953) and Philosophical Papers (1959). He also edited the journal Mind (1921-47) and made it the major English-language journal in the field.

Bibliography: D Rohatyn, The Reluctant Naturalist (1987)