A Defence of Common Sense

Introduction

Moore wrote this essay in 1925 for the second series of Contemporary British Philosophy, a collection in which philosophers set out their own positions. He begins with a list of propositions he claims to know with certainty – that he has a body, that it has existed for many years, that other people exist – and argues that philosophers who deny them contradict themselves, since they too believe such things. The question for philosophy, he holds, is not whether such propositions are true but how they are to be analysed. The essay prepared Moore’s “Proof of an External World” (1939). Wittgenstein’s last notes, published as On Certainty, are a long engagement with it.

Connections

Answered in

• On Certainty1969 · Ludwig Wittgenstein

More works by G. E. Moore

• 1903Principia Ethica
• 1903The Refutation of Idealism