ABSTRACT
G. E. Moore, for all his criticisms of F. H. Bradley, never identified himself with the cause of Positivism, and L. Wittgenstein’s preoccupation, in the period with which philosophers are concerned, was with the things said by analytic philosophers, men who had professedly eschewed metaphysics. Plain men and Sophists, for all the latter’s pretensions to insight, pass their lives in the confused state of belief: their true understanding of themselves and of the world about them is nil. On the contrary, it is typical of metaphysicians generally to start their treatises with the assertion that things seem, or are commonly thought, to be thus-and-thus, but turn out on reflection to be very different. Professor Morris Lazerowitz was so impressed by Moore’s argument that he maintained in his book The Structure of Metaphysics that there must be deep reasons why metaphysicians persisted in saying what they and everyone else knew to be false.
