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The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

David Bell
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Extract

The question I shall attempt to address in what follows is an essentially historical one, namely: Why did analytic philosophy emerge first in Cambridge, in the hands of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and as a direct consequence of their revolutionary rejection of the philosophical tenets that form the basis of British Idealism? And the answer that I shall try to defend is: it didn't. That is to say, the ‘analytic’ doctrines and methods which Moore and Russell embraced in the very last years of the nineteenth century were not revolutionary, did not emerge first in Cambridge, were the creation of neither Russell nor Moore and cannot be explained by appeal to facts concerning British Idealism. The adoption of the doctrines and methods which characterised the earliest manifestations of British analytic philosophy are to be explained neither by reference to anything specifically British, nor by appeal to anything unproblematically philosophical. Or so I shall argue.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 44 , March 1999 , pp. 193 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1999

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References

1 Hylton, P., Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).Google Scholar

2 Russell, B., My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954), pp. 42, 62.Google Scholar

3 Russell, B., Autobiography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 134–5.Google Scholar

4 Russell, B., ‘My Mental Development’, in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell Schilpp, P. (ed.), (Evanston, Illinois: The Library of Living Philosophers), 1946. p. 12.Google Scholar

5 See, e.g., Aune, B., ‘Metaphysics of Analytic Philosophy’ in Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology (eds) Burkhardt, H. and Smith, B.. (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1991), vol. II, p. 539Google Scholar. A. J. Ayer, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 141. T. Baldwin, G. E. Moore (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–2. M. A. E. Dummett, Ursprunge der analytischen Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988), p. 7.

6 I shall have nothing to say about the works of Moore and Russell in the period before 1899. For details see, e.g., Hylton, P., Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy, pp. 72–101 and 117–21Google Scholar; and Griffin, N., Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Russell, B.. My Philosophical Development, p. 37.Google Scholar

8 When we look beneath the covers of early psychology in Britain, we do indeed find some interesting bedfellows.

9 Croom Robertson's ‘Editorial’, Mind, vol 1 (1876), p. 2.

10 Again, Russell himself may be in part responsible for this dismissive response. In My Philosophical Development, for instance, Stout is mentioned only once, and dismissed as ‘a Hegelian’. Ward too is dispatched in peremptory fashion as ‘a Kantian’ (p.38).

11 Incidentally, Ward had himself spent a number of years studying psychology in Germany, in both Gottingen and Berlin. It was Ward who eventually persuaded Moore and Russell to study abroad. And it was Ward, moreover, who first introduced Russell to Meinong, Poincare, Cantor, and Frege (he gave Russell a copy of Frege's Begriffsschrift in 1896, though Russell failed to perceive its significance for at least another 4 or 5 years). See N. Griffin, Russell's Idealist Apprenticeship, pp.35–45.

12 Stout, G. F., Analytical Psychology (London: Sonnenschein, 1896).Google Scholar

13 Moore, G. E., ‘An Autobiography’, in The Philosophy of Moore, G. E.(ed.) Schilpp, P. A., (Evanston and Chicago: The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc, Northwestern University), p. 29Google Scholar

14 Brentano, F., Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1874)Google Scholar. Trans, by Rancurello, A. C. et al. , as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).Google Scholar

15 By Moore's early writings I mean especially ‘The Nature of Judgment’, Mind, vol. 8 (1899), pp. 176–93Google Scholar; ‘Review of Russell's An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry’, Mind vol. 8 (1899) pp. 397–405Google Scholar; ‘Experience and Empiricism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 3 (1902–1903), pp. 80–95Google Scholar; ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, Mind, vol. 12 (1903), pp. 433–53Google Scholar; Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press, 1903)Google Scholar, ‘Review of Franz Brentano's The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong', International Journal of Ethics, vol. 14 (1903), pp. 115–33Google Scholar; and ‘The Subject Matter of Psychology’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 10 (1909–1910), pp. 36–62Google Scholar

16 The phrase was coined by Chisholm. See, Chisholm, R. M., Brentano and Intrinsic Value (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 15.Google Scholar

17 Hylton, P., Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy, p.143.Google Scholar

18 Moore, G. E., ‘The Nature of Judgment’, p. 182.Google Scholar

19 Bradley, F. H., Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 347.Google Scholar

20 Compare Russell's stark assertion: ‘An idea which can be defined, or a proposition which can be proved, is only of subordinate philosophical interest. The emphasis should be laid on the indefinable and indemonstrable, and here no method is available save intuition.’ Russell, B., A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1900ü1975), p. 171.Google Scholar

21 Compare Russell's famous affirmation of ontological commitment: ‘Being is that which belongs to every conceivable term, to every possible object of thought - in short to everything that can possibly occur in any proposition, true or false, and to all such propositions themselves. … Numbers, the Homeric gods, relations, chimeras and four-dimensional spaces all have being …’. B. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, p. 449.

22 Moore, G. E., ‘The Nature of Judgment’, pp. 192–93.Google Scholar

23 I shall say nothing here about Moore's ethics, except to note that he subscribed to the following theses:?

(1). There is just one primitive ethical concept, in terms of which all other ethical concepts can be defined.

(2). The concept in question is that of intrinsic value, or good as an end in itself.

(3). This property is entirely objective, and ethical judgements of goodness are either correct or incorrect.

(4). The property of goodness is a non-natural property, in other words it is not the case that ’it has existed, does exist, or will exist in time’.

(5). The fundamental principles of ethics are self-evident, that is, the evidence for them is given in immediate intuition.

(6). There are a plurality of goods, amongst which the most important are the ‘higher’ goods of knowledge and the aesthetic satisfaction we take in the contemplation of genuinely beautiful things. ll of these theses are to be found in Brentano's ethical writings.

24 I have little doubt that Moore inherited this doctrine from Stout, who disagreed with Brentano on precisely this point, and who wrote: ‘We may, I think, confidently affirm that the object of thought is never a content [i.e., a part] of our finite consciousness.’ G. F. Stout, Analytical Psychology, p. 45.

25 And neither should we think that on this issue Moore differed significantly from other Brentanians. As Coffa rightly observes, all of Brentano's most notable followers accepted that ‘the object that is the target of the intentional act is not a mere component of the act, but must enjoy a mindindependent form of being.’ (Coffa, J. A., The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Camap [Cambridge University Press, 1991], p. 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar). In this respect Moore's modification of Brentano's original theory of intentionality was no different from, say, Husserl's, Meinong's, Höfler's, Twardowski's or, as we have seen, Stout's.

26 With massive (but of course unintentional) irony, Moore's major criticism of Brentano is precisely that he does not acknowledge organic wholes. See G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, p. xi, and ‘Review of Brentano’, pp. 117ff.

27 Moore's Brentanianism lasted a long time. His article ‘The Subject Matter of Psychology’ appeared in 1910, and is Brentanian throughout.

28 Although he gives no grounds for it, Michael Dummett's verdict on the contributions of Russell and Moore is similar: ‘Important as Russell and Moore both were, neither was the, or even a source of analytical philosophy.’ Dummett, M. A. E., Origins of Analytical Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993), p. ix.Google Scholar

29 For their helpful comments on the material contained in early drafts of this paper, I would like to thank Michael Dummett, Andy Hamilton, Bill Hart, Peter Hylton, Kevin Mulligan, Mike Rosen, Mark Sacks, John Skorupski and Peter Sullivan.