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Moore's Arguments and Scepticism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Charles Raff
Charles Raff
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College
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Extract

Once, G. E. Moore scorned the “common point of view which takes the world of experience as ultimately real.” The argument Moore followed to this sceptical conclusion in his fledgling 1897 fellowship dissertation was a legacy from Kant's Antinomies. By 1899 Moore had renounced idealist conclusions; he set out both to disengage from Kantian arguments and to reconcile with “the world of experience.” Moore's work for a stable realist basis for knowledge to fulfil both aims occupied his most famous argument, in his 1939 lecture “Proof of an External World.” Moore himself is sometimes supposed to have thought the argument of this masterwork unsatisfactory where it treats a traditional sceptical puzzle posed by dreaming. Critics, including Wittgenstein, have portrayed Moore's best reply to philosophical scepticism as dogmatic mere assertion, unresponsive or as ineffectual as sheer handwaving. However, these critics rate Moore's success against scepticism based on interpretations of “Proof of an External World” that neglect its part in Moore's campaign against Kant. Consequently, some potentially pivotal questions — which in this study I merely broach — remain wide open; for example, why in presenting his famous 1939 proof did Moore state that its purpose was to refute what “Kant declares to be his opinion, that there is only one possible proof of the existence of things outside of us” (PXW, p. 145)? And why did Moore explicitly reject the formula for posing philosophical scepticism in which Kant famously proclaimed this problem “a scandal to philosophy”?

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , Fall 1992 , pp. 691 - 700
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1992

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References

Notes

1 Abbreviated references in the text cite the reprints of Moore's articles: “Proof of an External World” (PXW), “A Defense of Common Sense” (DCS), and “Some Judgments of Perception” (SJP), in his Philosophical Papers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959)Google Scholar; of “The Refutation of Idealism” (RI) and “Hume's Philosophy” (HP), in his Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922)Google Scholar; and Some Main Problems of Philosophy (SMPP) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953.Google Scholar

2 Stroud, Barry, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clarke, Thompson, “The Legacy of Scepticism,” Journal of Philosophy, 69, 20 (November 9, 1972): 754–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 69.Google Scholar

3 The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, edited by Schilpp, P. A., 3rd ed. (La Salle: Open Court, 1968), p. 668.Google Scholar

4 Malcolm, Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 71.Google Scholar Cf. Malcolm, Norman, Thought and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 192, 193.Google Scholar

5 Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhonenses Hypotyposes I 6.

6 I have benefited from discussion with Andreas Eshete and Brie Gertler.