ABSTRACT

I propose to speak to you this evening on some neglected sides of the thought of G. E. Moore. It might seem strange that one can find anything neglected in a philosopher so much admired and so frequently cited as G. E. Moore. The fact is, however, that, as in the case of a great philosopher like Leibniz, whose fame among his contemporaries was vast, Moore’s general ‘image’, even among philosophers, is very far from doing justice to the actual thinker: in some respects, I should say that he really is the unknown philosopher. The people who read him, teachers and pupils alike, generally read him by the way, as leading up to or throwing light on other people: he is rather like Padua or Verona, with their incomparable art-treasures, in which people spend a few hours on their journey to Venice. There is, if you will read some recent writing on Moore—I shall refer particularly to Professor Wisdom’s Foreword to Some Main Problems of Philosophy and to Mr Alan White’s in many ways excellent book—a note of faint patronage, of historical relegation, in the way people speak of Moore: he is spoken of much as the Germans used to talk of der gute Locke. I wish to suggest this evening that Moore is undoubtedly the greatest British philosopher of the present century, and that he stands with perhaps William of Ockham and David Hume among the three greatest philosophers we have ever produced. No one has at all approached him in dialectical accuracy, or in the ability to talk with unfailing clearness on the most difficult of philosophical issues. Even as a stylist I should hold him unsurpassed. Why then is it the case that he is so comparatively unappreciated?