Abstract
G. E. Moore, unlike most prophets, is honoured only in his own country—the small world of the Aristotelian Society and the Cambridge Moral Science Club. To outsiders he is known, if at all, mainly because of his connection with his more flamboyant colleagues, Russell and Wittgenstein. Yet Moore’s influence on the intellectual life of this century is hardly calculable. Philosophy as it is now taught in the universities of the English–speaking world derives its character, largely, from his personal habits of thought. He bequeathed it its most obvious and, to the layman, most irritating characteristics—the emphasis on linguistic analysis and the tendency to avoid the really important problems, the problems which determine our way of life. Contemporary English philosophy is, like Moore’s, a philosophy of common–sense. It is concerned, not so much with truth but with meaning, the meaning of those statements whose truth is guaranteed by common–sense; hence arise the method of linguistic analysis and the failure to tackle those problems which common–sense cannot answer.