Moore, G. E. (1873-1958), a British philosopher, thought of philosophy as a rational approach to practical questions about the real world. In ethics, the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of right and wrong, he was interested in how we know what is good. In his most widely read book, Principia Ethica (1903), Moore argued that we know good actions from bad ones by intuition, not by analyzing behavior according to logical concepts. Intuition must be used because it is not possible to define the idea of good.
Moore favored common sense as the best approach to argue against idealism. Idealism is the belief that the existence of things depends on the mind and ideas (see Idealism ). He thought that common sense leads us to assume that material objects do exist independently of the mind.
Moore’s impact on British philosophy was as much a result of his style as of his ideas. His habit of asking sharp and disturbing questions was compared to Socrates’s method of posing questions. Moore’s clear writing was compared to that of Plato. His other books include Ethics (1912), Philosophical Studies (1922), and Some Main Problems of Philosophy (1953).
George Edward Moore was born on Nov. 4, 1873, in London. He graduated from Trinity College in Cambridge where he taught from 1911 until 1939. Moore was editor of the philosophical journal Mind from 1921 until 1947. He died on Oct. 24, 1958.
