G. E. Moore 1873 – 1958

George Edward Moore was a British philosopher and, with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a founding figure of the analytic tradition at Cambridge. In Principia Ethica he argued that good is a simple, indefinable property and exposed what he called the naturalistic fallacy, the attempt to define good in terms of any natural feature. His Defence of Common Sense and Proof of an External World became touchstones of twentieth-century epistemology, articulating a robust realism against idealism and skepticism. Moore's plain style and patient analysis shaped the analytic temperament for generations.

George Edward Moore was born at Hastings in November 1873, the son of a doctor of strong nonconformist convictions. He read classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1892, took his bachelor's in 1896, and was elected to a Trinity prize fellowship in 1898 on the basis of a dissertation on Kant's ethics. He taught at Edinburgh and London before returning to Cambridge in 1911, was elected Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy in 1925, and edited the journal Mind from 1921 to 1947. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1951.

His books include Principia Ethica (1903), Ethics (1912), Philosophical Studies (1922), Some Main Problems of Philosophy (the 1910–11 lectures, published 1953), and Philosophical Papers (1959); among his most reprinted single essays are 'The Refutation of Idealism' (1903), 'A Defence of Common Sense' (1925), and 'Proof of an External World' (1939).

Moore argued that the predicate 'good' names a simple, non-natural property and that any attempt to define it in natural or metaphysical terms commits the 'naturalistic fallacy'; his Principia Ethica supplied the moral vocabulary of the Bloomsbury group. The 'Refutation of Idealism' helped to inaugurate the analytic break with British absolute idealism, and his common-sense rebuttal of philosophical scepticism — 'Here is one hand, and here is another' — became one of the central touchstones of twentieth-century epistemology. He died at Cambridge in October 1958.