Book: Some Main Problems of Philosophy

Overview
George Edward Moore gathers incisive lectures and essays that cluster around perennial philosophical concerns: how knowledge is attained, what exists, how values are understood, and how philosophy should proceed. The collection articulates a steady, common-sense realism and an analytic insistence on clarity, resisting grand metaphysical reconstructions and skeptical paralysis. Moore's voice is plain, argumentative, and oriented toward dissolving confusions rather than building speculative edifices.

Structure and Style
Short, tightly reasoned pieces replace extended systematic argumentation. Each chapter isolates a problem, examines ordinary language and commonly held convictions, and exposes the mistakes that produce philosophical puzzles. The prose favors direct examples, careful distinctions, and modest conclusions; the aim is less to settle every question once and for all than to show which questions arise from sloppy premises or equivocal terms.

Knowledge and Skepticism
A persistent target is radical skepticism about the external world and other minds. Moore revives the spirit of his famous "proof of an external world" by insisting that certain ordinary propositions, such as the existence of hands or tables, have a prima facie epistemic status that skeptical arguments must respect. Skeptical scenarios are treated as abstract possibilities that cannot unsettle the basic epistemic warrant of ordinary certainties unless one assumes controversial premises. The result is a defense of everyday knowledge as philosophically respectable and often demonstrably more secure than the sceptic's skeptical premises.

Reality and Perception
Moore defends a form of common-sense realism about material objects and rejects forms of idealism that collapse external reality into mere appearances. Perception is presented as a relation to independent objects rather than an enigmatic inner datum that must be reconstructed into reality. While he acknowledges the fallibility and metaphysical limitations of perceptual reports, Moore insists that ordinary perceptual claims function as immediate grounds for belief about a world that exists independently of thought.

Value and Ethics
Ethical reflections draw on themes from Moore's earlier work, especially the insistence that moral goodness resists simple reduction to natural properties. He reiterates a cautious pluralism about value claims: moral judgments are intelligible and often rooted in common-sense attitudes, but attempts to translate "good" into purely naturalistic terms misunderstand the conceptual shape of evaluative discourse. Moore is skeptical of sweeping ethical systems that pretend to deduce specific moral truths from a single principle, arguing instead for careful analysis of the concepts and language at play.

Method and Legacy
Across topics, the dominant methodological lesson is restraint: careful analysis of ordinary language and ordinary beliefs can dissolve many traditional problems without inventing new metaphysical machinery. Moore's approach helped to consolidate analytic philosophy's commitment to clarity, argument, and respect for common-sense starting points, and it influenced debates about perception, skepticism, and value theory throughout the twentieth century. The collection stands as a practical handbook of philosophical temper, skeptical of sweeping theorizing, confident in everyday knowledge, and committed to the disciplined parsing of concepts.