When G. E. Moore died in 1958 the obituary notices mourned the death of a “great philosopher”. But now, some sixty years after his death and more than a century since many of his main publications, his life and work belong to the history of philosophy, and some doubt that he left any long-term contributions to philosophical understanding and debate (in April, Ray Monk wrote a piece in Prospect asking “why did GE Moore disappear from history?”). So, were the obituaries right?
Moore (who much disliked his forenames “George Edward”, and was always known as plain “Moore”) was born in Upper Norwood (south-east London) in 1873. His parents were Baptists, and there was a strong religious atmosphere at home which prompted him, as a young teenager, to feel that it was his duty to engage in evangelical activity despite a deep reluctance to do so. But a couple of years later Moore shed his religious beliefs and pronounced himself a “complete Agnostic”.
He was educated at Dulwich College, where he studied Latin and Greek, and in 1892 he won a scholarship to study Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Here his life changed: during his first year at Cambridge, his new friends and acquaintances introduced him to philosophical discussion and debate, and Moore was sufficiently excited and engaged by these discussions to add philosophy to his studies for the next two years. Bertrand Russell later described him: “In my third year I met G. E. Moore, who was then a freshman, and for some years he fulfilled my ideal of genius. He was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of inspiration as deeply passionate as Spinoza’s”. Moore was invited to join the Apostles, a group of students and young academics devoted to the discussion of short philosophical papers, typically couched in a provocative idiom – Moore’s papers have titles such as “Are we hypocrites?” and “What is it to be wicked?”. After a few years, Moore became the leading figure in this group, some of whose younger members (many of whom would go on to participate in the Bloomsbury Set, such as Leonard Woolf, Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and John Maynard Keynes) became close friends.
