Volume 28, Number 5 · April 2, 1981
An Honest Man
By Morton White
Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles
by Paul Levy
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 335 pp., $18.95
G.E. Moore (1873-1958) was one of the most distinguished and most influential philosophers of the twentieth century in spite of having published only three full-length books during his long life: Principia Ethica (1903), Ethics (1912), and Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953). His Philosophical Studies (1922) was a collection of articles, perhaps the best known of which was 'The Refutation of Idealism' of 1903. In that famous paper Moore attacked Berkeley's doctrine that to be is to be perceived; at the same time he continued the assault on all forms of idealism that he had begun in 'The Nature of Judgment' of 1899, a paper which Bertrand Russell regarded as the first shot in a war against Kant, Hegel, and their British followers. Soon Russell fired his own formidable guns against idealism, and the philosophical movement known as realism was launched. Both Moore and Russell joined most of the rest of mankind in believing that tables and chairs exist independently of perception, but at the same time they agreed with Plato that timeless attributes, which they identified with the meanings of common nouns and adjectives, exist independently of thought.
Review, 2838 words
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