Goerge Edward Moore, Refutation On Idealism

Moore grew up in South London (his eldest brother was the poet T. Sturge Moore who worked as an illustrator with W. B. Yeats). In 1892 he went to Trinity College Cambridge to study Classics. He soon made the acquaintance there of Bertrand Russell who was two years ahead of him and of J. M. E. McTaggart who was then a charismatic young Philosophy Fellow of Trinity College. Under their encouragement Moore decided to add the study of Philosophy to his study of Classics, and he graduated in 1896 with a First Class degree in the subject. At this point he turned his energies towards attempting to follow in the footsteps of McTaggart and Russell by winning a ‘Prize’ Fellowship at Trinity College which would enable him to continue the study of philosophy there. In 1898 he was successful and over the next six years he matured as a dynamic young philosopher, actually leading Russell away from the idealist philosophy of McTaggart and others which was then dominant in Britain. Moore's Fellowship ended in 1904; after a spell away from Cambridge, Moore returned there in 1911 to a lectureship in the University and he then lived there for the rest of his life (apart from an extended visit to the U.S.A. in 1940-44). In 1921 he became editor of  Mind , the leading British philosophical journal, and in 1925 he became a Professor at Cambridge. These two appointments confirmed his position as the most highly respected British philosopher of the time, and with Wittgenstein back in Cambridge after 1929, Cambridge became the most important centre of philosophy in the world. Moore retired as Professor in 1939 (to be succeeded by Wittgenstein) and as editor of  Mind  in 1944; these retirements marked not only the end of his pre-eminence, but also of the golden age of Cambridge philosophy. Early in his time in Cambridge Moore became friends with some of the young men who went on to form the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, such as Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes. Through these friendships Moore exerted an indirect influence on British twentieth-century culture as profound as that of any more ‘engaged’ philosopher. These long-lasting friendships bear witness to Moore's Socratic personality and thus to a side of his character which his writings do not convey. Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford philosopher who was Moore's successor both as editor of  Mind  and as the dominant British philosopher after 1945, emphasized this side of Moore's personality: He gave us courage not by making concessions, but by making no concessions to our youth or our shyness. He treated us as corrigible and therefore as responsible thinkers. He would explode at our mistakes and muddles with just that genial ferocity with which he would explode at the mistakes and muddles of philosophical high-ups, and with just the genial ferocity with which he would explode at mistakes and muddles of his own. (Ryle 270)