Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Moore

  • Among the Riddles of Existence

    Among the riddles of existence are the riddles that are artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. This is one way into philosophy. It is the way of G. E. Moore. What riddled him was not the world so much as the strange things philosophers such as F. H. Bradley…

  • Two Ways into Philosophy

    Among the riddles of existence are the artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. What started G. E. Moore philosophizing was not so much the world as the puzzling things people such as F. H. Bradley said about it.  That too is a way into philosophy, if an inauthentic one.…

  • Which is More Certain, God or My Hands?

    A reader inquires, "I'm curious, if someone asked you what you were more certain of, your hands or belief in the existence of God, how would you respond?" The first thing a philosopher does when asked a question is examine the question.  (Would that ordinary folk, including TV pundits, would do likewise before launching into gaseous answers…

  • Go For Broke and Die With Your Boots On!

    Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, pp. 56-57: Moore's health was quite good in 1946-47, but before that he had suffered a stroke and his doctor had advised that he should not become greatly excited or fatigued. Mrs. Moore enforced that prescription by not allowing Moore to have a philosophical discussion with anyone for longer…

  • An Open Question

    G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica was very influential.  But is it good?

  • Existence and an ‘Open Question’ Consideration

    G. E. Moore famously responded to the hedonist's claim that the only goods are pleasures by asking, in effect: But is pleasure good?  The point, I take it, is that the sense of 'good' allows us reasonably to resist the identification of goodness and pleasure.  For it remains an open question whether pleasure really is good.  To…

  • Ernest Gellner on Ordinary Language Philosophy: Moore as Wittgensteinian Man

    The following quotations from Ernest Gellner's Words and Things  are borrowed from Kieran Setiya's site. Academic environments are generally characterised by the presence of people who claim to understand more than in fact they do. Linguistic Philosophy has produced a great revolution, generating people who claim not to understand what in fact they do. Some achieve…

  • On The Ground With G. E. Moore

    (This is an entry from the old Powerblogs site.  It was written a few years ago.  It is just a bit of pedantry in which I wax peevish over pleonasm.) ‘On the ground’ is getting a bit too much use for my taste. What the devil does it mean? "Coming up, a live report from Geraldo…

  • Peter van Inwagen, Artifacts, and Moorean Rebuttals

    Two commenters in an earlier van Inwagen thread, the illustrious William the Nominalist and the noble Philoponus of Terravita,  have raised Moore-style objections to an implication of PvI's claim that "every physical thing is either a living organism or a simple" (MB 98), namely, the implication that "there are no tables or chairs or any…

  • When Is an Identification an Elimination, and When Not? Idealism and Eliminativism not in the Same Logical Boat

    A reader, recently deployed to Afghanistan, finds time to raise an objection that I will put in my own words to make it as forceful as possible: You endorsed William Lycan's Moorean refutation of eliminative materialism, but then you criticized him for thinking that Moorean appeals to common sense are also effective against  standard idealist claims such as…

  • Greco on Stroud on Moore on the External World with a Shot at Stove

    John Greco (How to Reid Moore) finds Barry Stroud's interpretation of G. E. Moore's proof of an external world implausible: According to him [Stroud], the question as to whether we know anything about the external world can be taken in an internal or an external sense. In the internal sense, the question can be answered…

  • Can One See that One is Not a Brain-in-a-Vat?

    John Greco, How to Reid Moore: So how does one know that one is not a brain in a vat, or that one is not deceived by an evil demon? Moore and Reid are for the most part silent on this issue. But a natural extension of their view is that one knows it by…