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Principia Ethica Re-examined: The Ethics of a Proto-logical Atomism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Julius Kovesi
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia

Extract

One of the questions that any future history of British moral philosophy in the twentieth century should investigate and document is how it came about that Moore's Principia Ethica was appropriated by what we can call theHumean tradition of moral philosophy. I shall not trace that development now but only argue that there was no excuse or justification for it.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984

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References

1 Hume himself has equally been appropriated by contemporary British moral philosophy. But however inaccurately the tag ‘Hume on “is”and “ought”’ is used, it does identify the tradition that uses this tag.Google Scholar

2 Principia Ethica, p. xi. For ease of referenceI shall put further page references to Principia Ethica and to ‘The Nature of Judgment’ (Mind, 1899) into the text, abbreviating the references to P.E. and N. J. respectively.Google Scholar

3 International Journal of Ethics (1903), 117.

4 I would like to mention here how much I learnt from discussions on these problems with Mrs Shasta Dawson.Google Scholar

5 See my ‘Against the Ritual of “Is”and “Ought”’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy III (1978), 6.Google Scholar