Moore’s Beginnings (review)

Reviewed by: Moore’s Beginnings Nicholas Griffin Consuelo Preti. The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics: G. E. Moore and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Pp. xx, 268. isbn: 978-0-230-27762-5, us$57.50 (hb); 978-1-137-31907-4, us$44.99 (ebook). For many years now Consuelo Preti has been studying the life and work of G. E. Moore, especially in the period before the First World War when he and Russell were closest. In a series of important publications, she has transformed our knowledge of the early Moore, making full use of his papers, now in the Cambridge University Library after many years in private hands. Of these, the most important, at least for Russell scholars, was the publication of Moore’s two Fellowship dissertations, which she edited with Thomas Baldwin,1 for it was with the second of these that Moore broke free from neo-Hegelianism and took Russell with him. Preti now follows this up with an extensive and detailed account of the dissertations’ intellectual background. Moore submitted two dissertations—both called “The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics”—in an attempt to win a six-year Trinity College Prize Fellowship. The first, in 1897, like most first attempts at a Trinity Prize Fellowship, failed; but the second, the following year, was successful. In his autobiography Moore famously said that he didn’t think “the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world [End Page 86] and the sciences.”2 Accordingly, his first dissertation was “an attempt to make sense” of Kant’s “extremely mysterious assertions” about freedom and the second an attempt “to see clearly what Kant meant” by the “very mystifying manner” in which he used the word “reason”.3 This may seem a long way from the metaphysical basis of ethics, but the concept of will was central to Kant’s ethics, so it was natural to inquire in what sense, if any, an action could be said to be freely willed and this in turn to the distinction between actions which were caused and those which were undertaken for a reason. As Moore admits in the preface to the first dissertation, he had not had time to complete it as he intended. As it stands, it consists of a longish introduction, a single very long chapter on “Freedom, with special reference to Kant”,4 and an appendix on Sidgwick’s hedonism. Almost all this material reappears in the second dissertation, but the long chapter was there divided into two, separating Moore’s treatment of Kant from his own views on freedom. (Both Sidgwick and Edward Caird, his examiners in 1897, had complained that it was not easy to tell when he was interpreting Kant and when he was giving his own views.)5 The appendix on Sidgwick’s hedonism is joined by a new one on the dating of Kant’s ethical writings. (Caird had complained that he had not paid enough attention to this in the 1897 dissertation.) There is a new introduction and a brief concluding chapter directly on Kant’s ethics. But, most importantly, Moore opened the 1898 dissertation with two wholly new chapters: “On the meaning of ‘Reason’ in Kant” and “Reason”. It was the second of these, the bulk of which Moore published in Mind in 1899 under the title “The Nature of Judgment”, that inaugurated the revolution in philosophy associated with his name and Russell’s. Preti doesn’t get to this part of the story until her fourth and final chapter. Most of her book is taken up with a wide-ranging and detailed back-story to the dissertations and she begins, reasonably enough, with what has become known (even in English) as the Psychologismusstreit: the quarrel about psychologism. Psychologism was a doctrine defined to be false: an inappropriate appeal to psychological elements in constructing a philosophical position. Of course, the keyword here is “inappropriate”, and substantive debates raged as to which psychological elements were inappropriate to which philosophical projects.6 By the late nineteenth century, most Anglophone...

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