also i've been reading g.e. moore, who i'm beginning to think is in his own weird way one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. i started in to reading all his papers again because i was reading my own manuscript and realizing that moore - vaguely remembered from grad school - was actually central over and over. first of all, his "proof of the external world": here is a hand and here is another, which i regard as entirely decisive. and then his view about beauty - that beauty is a feature of a situation embedding both subject and object - was a model for my treatments of value.
he's a hard-ass realist: a complete believer in the everyday world. that's where i'm at. really his papers collected in philosophical studies and philosophical papers were the death of idealism in the british academy: what he does to f.h. bradley is similar to what the state of georgia did to troy davis. but he's just as fatal to the phenomenalism of mill or russell or carnap, for example. these papers were really the lynchpin of the onset of analytic philosophy and philosophy of language. he's not given enough credit for that; the voice of the best analytic philosophy is fully realized in his papers. he's remembered now primarily for principia ethica, pretty much the least interesting of his writings for my money. even there he's a vague figure to the present, and undervalued.
he is an extremely idiosyncratic stylist: disarmingly conversational and always first person, so that he uses itals to emphasize the words that give the sentence its rhythm in spoken english. but also oddly clotted. he's always issuing wild disclaimers: "i have no idea whether this is true or false; for all i know it's true; i could well be entirely mistaken, etc" before the total evisceration. really the stuff is extremely jocular, almost a slapstick routine or a parody - the right term might be 'high burlesque' - where he seems to proceed with punctilious care, piling up fine distinctions until you suddenly realize in the last paragraph that he's just landed you with a thud in the ordinary world.
i think actually ordinary language philosophy was more or less entirely prefigured in his work, which constantly defends ordinary uses of words against introduced funny philosophical senses. so when bradley says that time isn't real, he means that there really is no such thing, which means that one event never occurs before or after or at the same time as any other. indeed, he means that nothing ever happens at all. you know, then 'maybe that's not what bradley means when he says that time isn't real; i really have no idea, but if he means what most people mean when they say that unicorns aren't real, for example...' he even sort of leaves out the last nail: well, i think stuff does happen, don't you? so perhaps something has gone wrong in bradley's argument.
also my all-time hero j.l. austin, i'm realizing, really must have gotten a lot of his schtick from moore: the hilariousness or even vicious wit, the piling up of little distinctions until he completely collapses your house of cards, the implicit affirmation of the everyday world.
