
Why did GE Moore disappear from history? - Hooke
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ge-moore-philosophy-books-analytic-ray-monk-biography
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dvt
G.E. Moore didn't disappear from history. His Ethics (1907) and Principia
Ethica (1903) both remain widely cited. His _naturalistic fallacy_ remains a
major _tour de force_ in ethics[1], and his moral "super-objectivism" was
studied and critiqued throughout the 1900s by every heavy hitter out there:
from Geach, to Anscombe, to Foot, to Lawrence.

> ... but through the second half of the 20th century interest went into
> serious decline

I wish Monk were more clear here. Basically _all_ of non-natural moral theory
(virtue ethics, objectivism, Kantian ethics, divine law in theological
circles) went into a nosedive. Seriously, read Ansombe's MMP[2] and you'll see
how disillusioned she was with the state of moral philosophy -- which was, at
the time, mostly interested in linguistic and logical puzzles: is "good"
descriptive, predicative, commendatory, attributive, or what-have-you.

[1] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-
naturalism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/)

[2]
[https://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf](https://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf)

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hilbert42
_" G.E. Moore didn't disappear from history. His Ethics (1907) and Principia
Ethica (1903) both remain widely cited."_

Correct, G.E. Moore certainly didn't disappear from history. I still have my
copy of _Principia Ethica_ that was drummed into me in Phil. classes at
university decades ago.

I've kept a copy of this and other works such as Plato's _Republic_ along with
the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau and others that are so well know to
the cognoscenti that I needn't even name them—both because they are great and
important works that have stood the test of time and that I still occasionally
refer to them.

Given the many difficult moral and ethical dilemmas now facing the world, it
seems to me it's more important than ever that we should reacquaint ourselves
with Moore's works on ethics.

 _Incidentally, I 've just looked up notes on my laptop about a matter wherein
I've included a reference from Moore's Principia Ethica, that was on
2019-10-27. QED!_

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parenthesis
I know this is written by Ray Monk, but I don't think GE Moore has been
forgotten. Not by me, anyway.

No, he isn't one of the Big Names of Philosophy, but then, not many
philosophers are.

When I studied undergraduate philosophy early this century, his work and
arguments arose numerous times. And the strength of his philosophical
personality in his writings certainly left an impression on me.

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QuesnayJr
That was interesting. I really didn't know who Moore was (I think I recognized
the name), but everyone else in his circle was genuinely famous.

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GnarfGnarf
I'm intrigued by McTaggart's theory that time is unreal. However, try as I
may, I cannot understand A-series and B-series.

I think that time does not exist, it is merely an abstraction that measures
the relative rate of movement of matter. Everything we use to "measure" time
is based on the physical movement of matter: pendulum, hourglass, rotation of
Earth, watch balance wheel, even electronic crystal vibrations.

When we say that something took an hour, we mean that it elapsed while the
Earth spun 15 degrees. Or traveled 0.041 degrees around the sun. The passage
of time is simply the collective movement of all the matter in the Universe.
We cannot travel back in time because entropy has scattered everything.

The past is how matter was arranged before. The future is how it will be
after.

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atombender
Surely that's just redefining what time means. And the definition seems
tautological to me; when you say "movement of matter", that implies a time
dimension, since you cannot have movement without time. And the phrase "rate
of movement" uses a word (rate) that is inherently about time (meters per
second, for example).

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GnarfGnarf
Not really. The rate is movement-to-movement, not a ratio to units of time.

So, "meters per second" can be restated as "meters per 0.00001157407 earth
rotations" or meters per 15", where 15" is fifteen arc-seconds.

Hours and minutes are just placeholders.

0.00001157407 = 1 / (24 hrs * 60 min. * 60 secs)

15" = 360° * 60' * 60" / (24 hrs * 60 min. * 60 secs)

~~~
atombender
Restating rate as relative to motion doesn't eliminate time, it just redefines
it. If you have change, you have time.

Sounds like you _want_ to say that time is an emergent property of matter.

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actualist
Philosophical popularity waxes and wanes. At the level Monk describes, the
brilliant Frank Ramsey -- with notable philosophical contributions in truth
theory and probability, as well as in economic theory and mathematics -- seems
similarly missing, though he died at a mere 26. Anyway, as Russell once wrote:
"... since one never knows what will be the line of advance, it is always most
rash to condemn what is not quite in the fashion of the moment" (from his
review of MacColl’s Symbolic Logic and Its Applications in Mind, 15, 1906], p.
260).

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8bitsrule
Gary Shandling: "Nice guys finish first. If you don’t know that, then you
don’t know where the finish line is."

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sunstone
“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter..." \-
Richard Feynman

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ryder9
who

