ABSTRACT
THE IDEA OF THE MODERN G.E. Moore’s first book, Principia Ethica, which came out in 1903, changed the face of English-speaking moral philosophy for more than half a century, extending the surface revolution we have already noticed to ethics, and justifying the total retreat of the learned from this central area of everyday human thought. The personality of its author was very important here. In this book, the young Moore emerged at once as a prophet, already displaying his extraordinary personal force, though he scarcely yet showed his real greatness. This greatness was expressed later, when Moore supplied the central and deepest new insight for linguistic philosophy, an insight concerned with the dependence of all intellectual systems on common sense, with its vehicle common language. Moore then began to explore a deep sense in which common thought and language have to be primary, because they flow from and
express the way in which people actually live, while intellectual systems, however important and however influential, grow like branches out of this living thought. The systems therefore cannot simply displace or ignore it, as Russell tended to assume they could; they cannot treat it as a mere vulgar error. They have to find their place somewhere within it, as the parts of the city that Wittgenstein later described all find their place within that city and go to make it a whole. Though this basic respect for common sense had often been hinted at earlier in the British empiricist tradition – notably by Reid, Locke, and Butler – it had never before been fully developed. Nor is it at all easy to develop it without falling into a slick relativism, a readiness to exalt as ‘common sense’ whatever ideas happen temporarily to prevail. All the same, Moore in articles such as ‘The defence of common sense’ and Wittgenstein in all his later work did make progress towards that development. I take this progress to have been the real achievement of the linguistic or analytic movement.
