Essays on G. E. Moore

Knowing the characteristics of the external world has long been one of humankind’s greatest problems. Nevertheless, they have always encountered the problem of being able to secure that the knowledge they find there is actually true. Descartes was the most famous philosopher to first approach this problem skeptically. Nevertheless, many after him have found that this is not necessarily true, with G. E. Moore and Immanuel Kant giving compelling arguments for the existence of the outside world. Therefore, through analysis of that which does not belong to the self, one can gain knowledge of the characteristics of the ...

Even though one is bombarded every day with experiences that seem to be from the outside world, it is important to reflect on their validity and source before coming to a premature conclusion using only intuition. There is a general consensus that there is an outside world, which is what people feel and navigate through every day, and which has certain characteristics. Nevertheless, if one stops to critically examine the evidence that there is for this conclusion, one can see that many other interpretations are also possible. Most philosophers do not negate the different experiences and the possibility of ...

The “is vs. ought” fallacy occupies a special position in moral philosophy since it concerns one of the most important problems of human existence, namely the problem of moral choice. This fallacy consists in the gap between “what is the case” and “what ought to be the case” (“The Is/Ought Gap”) – in other words, in the gap between a fact and a moral judgment. It was discussed by D. Hume in his “Treatise of Human Nature” (“The Is/Ought Gap”): according to the author, to derive what a person ought to do from what a person does is an ...