/edu/ - Education

I hate G.E. Moore so much. His entire career was built off of declaring unfounded assumptions as true because, just, like, come on man. Trust me.

Look at his argument against hedonism. Henry Sidgwick says that "good" only exists as an objective property in one context: within conscious experience. He argues that beautiful objects cannot have any value in the external world, and that only the images of beautiful things within a mind are beautiful. In other words, he argues that things are only beautiful when they are perceived. G.E. Moore says this isn't true, because he imagines a world that he thinks looks nice, and then another world that he thinks doesn't, and says it's just intuitively obvious that the first is objectively better than the second! But you're still just comparing things in your mind, not things in the real world! The only thing you've demonstrated is that it's better for you to think about the first world than the second, not that the first world contains any objective quality that makes it better than the second! Someone else with opposite aesthetic tastes to your own could think about both worlds, and come to the opposite "intuitive" conclusion! You haven't provided any evidence for your assertions at all! It's madness! And they let this guy into Cambridge?

G. E. Moore's dogmatic adherence to intuition will forever live in infamy in one of the worst arguments in philosophical history, dwarfing his already quite stupid argument in favor of objective beauty. He claims to prove that we can be certain about the existence of the external world and that all skeptical hypotheses are false, because… the external world exists and all skeptical hypotheses are false. He just declares it, and so therefore it must be true. No epistemology needed. Damn. Why didn't Descartes think of that? Just think really hard that something is true, and then it must be true.

Ray Monk called him "the most revered philosopher of his era." Kill yourself Ray Monk. Fuck G. E. Moore and fuck intuitionism.