Inscribed by G.E. Moore in blue ink to the front free endpaper: ‘Mr & Mrs Smith from G.E. & Dorothy Moore’. The identities of the recipients remain obscure to this cataloguer; possibly the philosopher Norman Kemp Smith (1872-1958).
A collection published as the fourth instalment of The Library of Living Philosophers series edited by Arthur Schlipp bringing together contributions by nineteen contemporary philosophers variously examining the life and thought of the eminent Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore. The distinguished list of contributors includes Alice Ambrose, Norman Malcolm, Morris Lazerowitz, and C.D. Broad, amongst others.
The collection is most significant for the inclusion of Moore’s substantial 135-page ‘A Reply to My Critics’, an original piece prepared by Moore specifically for this volume in which he first presented his own conception of what is now commonly-known as ‘Moore’s Paradox’, which describes apparently self-contradictory first-person present-tense sentences such as “It is raining, but I do not believe that is raining.” Despite the apparent absurdity, “what is said is not contradictory, since both parts of it could be true. But the person nevertheless violates some presupposition of normal practice, namely that you assert something only if you believe it; by adding that you do not believe what you just said you undo the natural significance of the original act of saying it” (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, p. 240).
Moore had earlier expressed the idea in lectures at Cambridge but it was published here for the first time. The concept was particularly championed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who coined the term ‘Moore’s Paradox’ and further explored the idea in some of his later works.
