G. E. Moore Quotes on Knowledge
Moore's Defence of Common Sense (1925) and Proof of an External World (1939) argued that the propositions of common sense — that there are bodies, that they have existed for many years, that other people exist with minds — are more certain than any philosophical argument that would call them into question. Holding up his hand and saying here is one hand, and here is another suffices, Moore argued, to refute the skeptical idealist conclusions that more elaborate philosophical arguments had reached. The earlier Principia Ethica (1903) supplied the parallel ethical doctrine: good is a simple, indefinable, non-natural property, and the naturalistic fallacy is the attempt to define good in terms of any natural property whatever.
Quotes
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“Here is one hand, and here is another.”
Proof of an External World," Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (1939). -
Attributed to G. E. Moore:
“A philosophical question, when fully understood, will be found to be already half answered.”
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Attributed to G. E. Moore:
“In ethics the difficulty has been to discover what we mean when we use the word good.”
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“Principia Ethica (1903; revised edition, Cambridge University Press, 1993).”
By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we c -
“The study of Ethics would, no doubt, be far more simple, and its results far more "systematic," if, for instance, pain were an evil of exactly the same magnitude as pleasure is a good; but we have no reason whatever to assume that the Universe is such that ethical truths must display this kind of symmetry ... .”
Principia Ethica (1903), ch. VI. -
“Principia Ethica (1903), ch. VI.”
The study of Ethics would, no doubt, be far more simple, and its results far more "systematic," if, for instance, pain were an evil of exactly the same magnitude as pleasure is a good; but we have no reason whatever to assume that the Universe is such that ethical truths must display this kind of symmetry ... . -
“It is raining but I do not believe that it is.”
One of the statements presenting what has become known as " Moore's paradox , from a famous lecture concerning logical inconsistency in 1942, as quoted in Reason in Theory and Practice (1969) by Roy Edgley, p. 71; in which he also stated "It is not raining, but I believe that it is." These sentences are not logically contradictory, and yet it seems that no one could make a true assertion by sincer