On The Genealogy of Universals The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy First Edition Edition Fraser Macbride Full Chapter

On The Genealogy Of Universals: The
Metaphysical Origins Of Analytic

Philosophy First Edition. Edition Fraser
Macbride
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/on-the-genealogy-of-universals-the-metaphysical-orig
ins-of-analytic-philosophy-first-edition-edition-fraser-macbride/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 02/02/2018, SPi
On the Genealogy of Universals

On the Genealogy
of Universals
The Metaphysical Origins
of Analytic Philosophy
Fraser MacBride
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Fraser MacBride 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952711
ISBN 978–0–19–881125–1
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction1
1. Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 8
2. Moore’s Early Philosophy: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’ 24
3. Early Moore against the Particular–Universal Distinction:
Neque Substantia Neque Accidens43
4. Russell’s Early Philosophy: ‘I Share Locke’s Wonder’ 63
5. The Birth of the Particular–Universal Distinction: ‘But a Sleep
and a Forgetting’ 87
6. Later Moore and Whitehead Towards Categorial Pluralism:
‘Predication is a Muddled Notion’ 107
7. G.F. Stout’s Theory of Tropes: ‘So Sensible an Election for Oxford’ 129
8. Russell’s Higher-Order Judgement Relation: ‘A New Beast for Our Zoo’ 153
9. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ‘Die allgemeine Form des Satzes ist:
Es verhält sich so und so’ 183
10. Ramsey: ‘About the Forms of Atomic Propositions We Can
Know Nothing Whatever’ 203
Coda: Categorial Pluralism 234
Bibliography 239
Index 255
Preface
I decided to write this book because I’d become convinced that there is far more to
find out and far more to learn from the history of early analytic philosophy. Our grasp
of the origins of analytic philosophy is based upon far too narrow a base of historical
evidence, we’re too much in the grip of a certain broad brush stroke picture of what
happened, a picture that results from the reading and re-reading of a few standard texts
that have become overly familiar to us. And for all the sophistication we’ve acquired
and embroidering we’ve done during the intervening decades, there are still respects in
which the early analytic philosophers were wiser than we are.
This book has as a distant ancestor an M.Phil. thesis I wrote on the history of early
analytic philosophy at King’s College London supervised by Mark Sainsbury. The high
standards Mark set for interpreting and evaluating the texts of Frege and Russell and
his own writings still bear an influence. I am conscious of a continuing debt. I have also
benefited from many exchanges over the years with Hugh Mellor about Ramsey. He
originally suggested that I write a book on Ramsey and universals. Indeed it was his
lectures in Cambridge on Ramsey that introduced me to the subject. Shortly afterwards
Keith Campbell visited Cambridge and presented his own trope philosophy, subsequently
elucidated in his Abstract Particulars, as an antidote to Ramsey’s puzzlement about the
particular–universal distinction. By then I was hooked upon universals. Subsequently
Herbert Hochberg encouraged me to engage with the very early writings of G.E. Moore
from the late 1890s and early 1900s, whilst Jim Levine pointed me to Russell’s early
manuscripts written before The Principles of Mathematics (1903). Kevin Mulligan
encouraged me to think about G.F. Stout’s contribution, more generally to think outside
the rubric of the cartoon histories of philosophy that have become part of our analytic
folklore (see Mulligan (forthcoming) for some of the points he has made to me over the
years in the course of our discussions of the present book). Conversations with Ken
Gemes inspired me to think about the relationship of philosophy as a discipline to its
own history. Discussions with Roger White helped me towards an understanding of
the Tractatus. Mike Martin helped me towards an appreciation of the development of
Moore’s views on perception and their relationship to Moore’s ontology. E.J. Lowe has
also been an encouraging presence over several years, although, of course, he took a
very different view of things. His own assessment of Ramsey on universals can be
found in his Four-Category Ontology. It’s a source of great sadness to me that Jonathan
died before this book was completed. I am also indebted to another philosopher who is
sadly no longer with us and who discussed both in print and in person my work on the
particular–universal distinction, namely David Armstrong.
I am immensely grateful to Bill Demopoulos, Jane Heal, Frédérique Janssen-Lauret,
and Gary Kemp for reading more or less an entire draft of the book and for illuminating
viii Preface
discussion of the issues raised; and especially Bill and Frédérique for getting me across
the finishing line. I am grateful to Bob Stern too for reading the chapter on Kant,
amongst other chapters, and for his valuable feedback. Thanks are also due to Philipp
Blum for organizing an Eidos workshop in Geneva on a draft of the initial chapters and
to Gerry Callaghan and a reading group on the manuscript at Waterloo involving
Nicholas Ray, Greg Andres, David DeVidi, Nathan Haydo, Windsor Viney as well as
Gerry. Kevin Mulligan kindly organized a workshop on the penultimate draft and I’m
most grateful to the contributors for their thoughts and suggestions: Guido Bonino,
Manuel García-Carpintero, Charles Djordjevic, James Levine, Jimmy Plourde, Maria
van der Schaar, Graham Stevens, and José Zalabardo. Two anonymous referees for
Oxford University Press also provided valuable feedback and Peter Momtchiloff
encouragement and guidance.
For comments and support along the road I’d also like to thank Asunción Álvarez,
Helen Beebee, Renée Bleau, Jeremy Butterfield, Stewart Candlish, Sophia Connell,
Chris Daly, Julian Dodd, Dorothy Edgington, Kit Fine, Sacha Golob, Ghislain Guigon,
Tom Harrison, Katherine Hawley, Keith Hossack, Nick Jones, James Ladyman, Sam
Lebens, Alex Oliver, Francesco Orilia, Bryan Pickel, Catherine Pickstock, Chris
Pincock, Stephen Read, Stewart Shapiro, Peter Simons, Peter Sullivan, Mark Textor,
and Tim Williamson. No doubt I have forgotten someone, for which I’m sorry.
I am grateful to audiences at the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Geneva, Glasgow,
Guelph, Helsinki, Johannes-Gutenberg (Mainz), Manchester, Macerata, McMaster,
Oslo, Stirling, Stockholm, Turku, Waterloo, and Zurich, Birkbeck College London,
Trinity College Dublin, University of East Anglia, and the Central European University.
I have also benefited from interaction with students at the universities of London and
St. Andrews where I lectured on Russell and Wittgenstein, and the universities of
Cambridge, Glasgow, and McMaster where I lectured on metaphysics, especially Anne
Bosse, Luke Newberry, and Lillith Newton.
In this book I draw upon some of my previously published papers: ‘Ramsey on
Universals’, in H. Lillehammer and H. Mellor (eds.), Ramsey’s Legacy (Oxford University
Press, 2005), pp. 82–104, ‘The Russell-Wittgenstein Dispute: A New Perspective’, in
M. Textor (ed.) Judgement and Truth in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 206–41, and ‘The Transcendental Metaphysic of
G.F. Stout: His Defence and Elaboration of Trope Theory’, in A. Reboul (ed.), Mind,
Values, and Metaphysics: Philosophical Essays in Honour of Kevin Mulligan—Volume 1
(Springer, 2014), pp. 141–58. Although there are substantial emendations, elaborations,
and additions, I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to reuse material here.
A draft of the manuscript was completed whilst I was the Visiting Bertrand Russell
Professor at the McMaster University where the Russell Archive is kept, and I am
also grateful to the Carnegie Trust, the Mind Association, and the Arts and Humanities
Research Council for their support.
Introduction
Should we not distrust the jaunty assurance with which every age prides itself
that it at last has hit upon the ultimate concepts in which all that happens can be
formulated?
(A.N. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 1921)
This is a new history and a new kind of history of early analytic philosophy. It provides
an original perspective upon the origins and development of our subject by examining
hitherto neglected texts and figures that have been pushed out of the limelight into the
shadows, text and figures that have previously been ignored or dismissed as weak or
even as unintelligible, explaining their arguments and revealing their insights. These
texts and figures aren’t interpreted in isolation from one another. There’s an unfolding
narrative, the reconstruction of a thirty-year span of dispute and dialogue amongst the
most luminous and enterprising philosophers of their day, a narrative whose uniting
theme is the understanding and evolution of the intertwined concepts of universal and
particular and the distinction between them. This also makes it the first ever history of
these concepts in early analytic philosophy. And it’s exceptional as a contribution to
the history of analytic philosophy, or even analytic philosophy, because it’s meant as a
real genealogy, in a sense Nietzsche would have recognized, rather than a fictional one,
as most philosophical genealogies have been. The actual historical account of the con-
cepts of particular and universal is used to reveal that it was far from inevitable that
philosophy today should have come to take the particular–universal distinction for
granted as a piece of first philosophy.
G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell are usually credited with being the founding
fathers of analytic philosophy—Moore coming first, Russell following closely in his
footsteps. But Moore’s founding works from the late 1890s are typically overlooked
or dismissed as confused or incomprehensible. So even though Russell is supposed
to have started from behind, the prevailing impression is that Russell soon overtook
Moore, as Wittgenstein was later to overtake Russell. But this is all mistaken. We
shouldn’t let Russell overshadow Moore in our appreciation, anymore than we should
allow Wittgenstein to overshadow Russell. This book provides an account of Moore’s
early work as perfectly cogent but rejecting the distinction between particular and
universal. Of course the famous image of Russell following closely in Moore’s footsteps
2 introduction
comes from Russell’s own intellectual autobiography but he only came up with it six
decades later (1959: 42). It would have been more accurate for Russell to say that he
and Moore danced together. Sometimes one led, sometimes the other, on occasion they
stepped upon one another’s toes. This book goes deeper than ever before into the
philosophical as well as historical intricacies of Moore and Russell’s dance. It also delivers
a new account of the relationship between Russell and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is
typically cast as having devastated Russell with his criticisms of the multiple relation
theory of judgement. But Wittgenstein’s criticisms weren’t compelling and the picture
theory of the Tractatus is explained in this book as emerging out of one of Russell’s
own suggestions.
Whilst Moore and Russell are usually credited with parentage, it’s Frege that is
usually accorded the honorific ‘grandfather of analytic philosophy’.1 This book builds a
novel case that it was an engagement with Kant that lay behind the early efforts of Moore
and Russell, so it’s Kant rather than Frege that stands behind analytic philosophy as it
emerged in the late 1890s. The case isn’t merely that at the time they had read Kant but
hadn’t read Frege, although this is certainly true. What this book brings to light is the
fact that Kant himself had problematized the concepts of particular and universal in
the Critique of Pure Reason as Hume had problematized the concept of causation in the
Treatise. Otherwise inscrutable passages of Moore and Russell are then made intelligible
for the first time as a reaction to Kant’s critical treatment of the particular–universal
distinction. The real grandfathers of analytic philosophy were A.N. Whitehead and
G.F. Stout. Moore and Russell didn’t only read them but Whitehead taught Russell
and Stout taught both Moore and Russell. So there’s no need for an invisible hand
explanation to account for the influence of Stout and Whitehead. Their now neglected
efforts to undermine the particular–universal distinction are expounded and given
their due place here.
The period this book primarily explores and illuminates runs up until 1926, the year
that H.W.B. Joseph, F.P. Ramsey, and R. Braithwaite contributed to an Aristotelian
Society symposium on ‘Universals and the “Method of Analysis” ’. Their subject was
Ramsey’s paper ‘Universals’, published the previous year in Mind. In ‘Universals’ Ramsey
had argued against the a priori division of what exists into two classes, particulars and
universals.2 His paper beguiled and baffled its readers straightaway but nobody really
doubted it was an important and challenging paper. Subsequently ‘Universals’ earned
inclusion in the analytic philosophical canon. But what exactly did Ramsey mean?
There has been no consensus amongst his commentators. But this is because trying to
understand Ramsey’s ‘Universals’ in isolation is like trying to understand the signifi-
cance of the last few lines of a telephone conversation you’ve overheard, but only from
one end when you don’t know what went before. This book approaches ‘Universals’ in
See Dummett 1994: 26 and Burge 2005: 1.

1
See MacBride 2005b for alternative arguments, different but complementary to Ramsey’s, in favour of
2
scepticism about the particular–universal distinction.

introduction 3
an unprecedented fashion, explaining ‘Universals’ as the closing stage of a conversation

that had been going on since the emergence of analytic philosophy in the late 1890s, a
conversation inspired by Kant.
The development of the early analytic philosophers’ thinking about particulars and
universals, I will argue, has the contours of an unfolding Hegelian dialectic. It’s well
known that they advocated ontological pluralism, affirming the existence of many
things; they set themselves against ontological monism, the doctrine that there is only
one thing. But what’s almost invariably overlooked is that the early analytic philosophers
experimented and seriously entertained different answers to the question: how many
categories of things are there? By ‘categorial dualism’ I will mean the a priori doctrine
that there are exactly two categories of things, particulars and universals—where
‘thing’ means a constituent of a fact or a sub-factual ingredient of reality. But by
‘categorial monism’ I will mean not merely the a priori doctrine that there is only one
category of thing. I will also mean, more radically, that the category recognized is
neither the category of particular nor the category of universal but some category that
supersedes them both. So by these lights, neither many varieties of nominalism nor
many varieties of realism count as forms of categorial monism. They don’t because
either they say that there are things to be found on one side of the particular–universal
distinction but not the other or vice versa. By contrast, categorial monism rejects
the distinction outright. By ‘categorial pluralism’ I will mean the doctrine that there are
potentially many categories of thing, their character and number revealed a posteriori
as nature is disclosed to us.
As analytic philosophy emerged and advanced ventre à terre, each of these doctrines
was successively adopted.
Categorial Monism ⇒ Categorial Dualism ⇒ Categorial Pluralism
When Moore burst upon the scene with his ‘New Philosophy’ in the 1890s, he espoused
categorial monism, his ontological inventory consisting solely of mind-independent
concepts, where concepts are conceived by Moore to be neither particulars nor univer-
sals. After this initial revolutionary period, Moore and Russell took a reactionary turn,
swinging back to embrace the traditional dualism of particular and universal, that is,
categorial dualism. But Moore had his doubts, backed up by Whitehead, and as the
early decades of the twentieth century unfolded, analytic philosophy was pushed
inexorably towards categorial pluralism, the doctrine that there are potentially
many categories, not just one or two. The Zeitgeist came to rest with Wittgenstein
and Ramsey. They denied the necessity of shoehorning a priori whatever there
might turn out to be into any simple-minded onefold or twofold scheme (categorial
monism or dualism).
In this book I undertake a task never undertaken before, that of expounding
and explaining the intellectual processes whereby this dialectic unfolded. The New
Philosophy had its origins in Moore’s second Fellowship dissertation, The Metaphysical
Basis of Ethics, and Russell’s An Analysis of Mathematical Reasoning, both written in
4 introduction
the summer of 1898, works in which Moore and Russell were still influenced by Kant.
To set the stage for the emergence of the New Philosophy, I argue in chapter 1 that
Kant conceived the particular–universal distinction to be a piece of synthetic a priori
knowledge. As a piece of synthetic a priori knowledge Kant recognized that this dis-
tinction was no less epistemologically precarious than Hume had found the Principle
of Causality to be or the Axioms of Euclidean geometry.3 I explain how Kant valiantly
struggled, but failed, to vindicate the particular–universal distinction as a piece of
synthetic a priori knowledge. In the Metaphysical Deduction Kant proposed to derive
the categories from the general forms of judgement. But the Metaphysical Deduction
wasn’t fit for purpose, an especially visible weak spot in Kant’s plan for vindicating the
a priori status of the categories. This account of Kant isn’t offered merely as a recon-
struction of a neglected episode in the history of the theory of universals, although it is.
Rather because the Metaphysical Deduction failed, the thought becomes available
and salient that we cannot validly read off the categories from our familiar manners of
thinking and talking about the world. It was recognition that Kant’s transcendental
idealism had this weakness that provided an important stimulus to the development of
analytic philosophy.
Against this backdrop I provide an account of the genesis of the New Philosophy
in terms of Moore’s rejection of Kant’s idealism. The resulting system, examined in
chapter 2, emerged from Moore’s work on his second dissertation and was published
in his ‘Nature of Judgment’ (1899). In Moore’s early system, the world is conceived as
the totality of propositions, whether true or false, where propositions and their building
blocks, called ‘concepts’ by Moore, are conceived as maximally mind independent. In
chapter 3, I argue that the concepts of Moore’s early system are neither particulars
nor universals. They aren’t because Moore understood the categories of particular and
universal as Kant had done, in terms of predication. But Moore doubted that the
subject–predicate form belonged to the depth form of our descriptions of reality where
concepts are expressed and conjured. As part of his rejection of the idealist outlook,
Moore recognized a level of description underneath the level at which Kant applied
the categories.
In his Analysis of Mathematical Reasoning, Russell had sought to update and extend
Kant’s classification of judgement forms to reflect the logical variety of mathematical
judgements. Nonetheless the Analysis was a conservative work insofar as Russell
continued in this work to hold onto a version of the particular–universal distinction,
indeed putting forward arguments in its favour that were destined to subsequently
sway both him and Moore. In chapter 4 I explain how Russell abandoned his Kantian
outlook and became a convert to the New Philosophy Moore had put forward in ‘The
Nature of Judgment’. I show in the subtext to Russell’s lectures on Leibniz, delivered
in 1899 but published as A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), how
3
See MacBride 1999 and 2005c for a contemporary working out of Humean scepticism about the
particular–universal distinction independent of Kant’s framework.
introduction 5
Russell developed his own arguments for categorial monism, significantly arguments
based upon the inscrutability of particulars. Indeed his unpublished paper ‘On the
Classification of Relations’ (1899) anticipates the most famous argument of Ramsey’s
‘Universals’ against the particular–universal distinction.
But things didn’t stand still—such was the restless energy of the innovators of the
New Philosophy. In 1901 Moore reinvented the particular–universal distinction and
so categorial dualism supplanted categorial monism as the official doctrine of the
New Philosophy. Chapter 5 is devoted to an exposition and explanation of Moore’s
‘Identity’, perhaps the darkest, most baffling paper in the early analytic corpus, the
paper in which Moore argued for the categorial dualism he favoured in the early years
of the twentieth century. But things didn’t ossify there either. Doubts began to creep
back into Moore’s mind and before the decade was done Moore was wondering
whether categorial dualism was really too crude a scheme to accommodate the logical
variety of the judgements we truly make about reality. Meanwhile, Whitehead was en
route from being a mathematician to being a metaphysician; the philosophy of nature
Whitehead developed during the 1910s and 20s led him to a similar conclusion about
the particular–universal distinction as Moore had already done in his lectures. For
Whitehead, the particular–universal distinction was just a piece of Weltanschauung,
a fragment of an Aristotelian mind-set that requires us to straitjacket what exists
into a simple-minded division between particulars and universals, a binary division
that cannot be adequate to the extraordinary manifold diversity nature exhibits. In
chapter 6, I explain Moore’s change of heart about categorial dualism, as evidenced
in his 1910–11 lectures, and I chart the course of Whitehead’s intellectual development
towards categorial pluralism.
At the same time G.F. Stout was undertaking his own journey from being a
psychologist and a philosopher of psychology in the 1890s to being a metaphysician in
the 1920s. Like Moore in ‘The Nature of Judgment’ and Russell in The Philosophy of
Leibniz, Stout was an opponent of categorial dualism. In the place of the categories
of substance and attribute, Stout recommended a metaphysical scheme of abstract
particulars or tropes, an alternative version of categorial monism. In chapter 7 I pro-
vide a novel account of Stout’s pioneering arguments for this one-category scheme. In
a famous exchange with Stout in 1923, Moore set himself against abstract particulars
and tropes. Whilst Moore’s case against Stout was found convincing by a generation
of philosophers, it has recently become received wisdom that Moore failed even to
grasp the basics of Stout’s categorial monism. But I argue, against received wisdom,
that Stout’s version of categorial monism was crippled by its failure to account for
predication in general, a flaw that Moore exposed in his exchange with Stout but Stout
could not remedy.
Whilst Moore had come to be doubtful once more of categorial dualism by 1910,
Russell continued to espouse categorial dualism in one form or other, advancing
from a Kantian to a more Fregean orientation. In chapter 8, I explain how Russell’s
conception of the particular–universal distinction evolved and deepened as a result
6 introduction
of tandem changes in his thinking about the nature of judgement and the nature of
relations. This provides a new perspective upon the dispute between Russell and
Wittgenstein about the multiple relation theory of judgement. Russell wasn’t con-
founded by Wittgenstein’s criticisms at all—as so many commentators suppose. In
chapter 9, I explain how developing the picture theory out of a proto-version Russell
had already conjured with in 1906 led Wittgenstein to embrace categorial pluralism
in the Tractatus (1919/1922). As a consequence of his pictorial conception of repre-
sentation, Wittgenstein was led to the conclusion that the general propositional
form ‘such and such is the case’ marks the limit of what can be deduced a priori about
what we say or judge. But if nothing less general about the form of propositions can
be deduced then a fortiori we cannot deduce a priori any more specific forms of
judgement. It’s then a consequence of Wittgenstein’s picture theory that we cannot
determine a priori that our judgements will have the specific forms of judgements
about particulars and universals. What specific forms our judgements take can only
be revealed a posteriori. So Wittgenstein embraced categorial pluralism.
The culmination of this intellectual episode comes with Ramsey’s ‘Universals’
(1925) and his subsequent elucidations in ‘Universals and the “Method of Analysis” ’
(1926). ‘Universals’ has been almost invariably read in isolation. But ‘Universals’ is a
refraction of so much of the philosophy that was cutting edge in 1920s Cambridge, the
philosophy Ramsey had imbibed so much of during his remarkable hothousing educa-
tion.4 As a result, Ramsey’s critics, as well as philosophers who have thought them-
selves fellow travellers, have often failed to understand him, their reflections upon him
beside the point. In chapter 10, I remedy the defect of reading ‘Universals’ in isolation.
Ramsey’s case for categorial pluralism is explained in terms of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,
Whitehead’s philosophy of nature, and Russell’s introduction to the second edition of
Principia Mathematica (1925).
The perspective that emerges from Wittgenstein and Ramsey’s complementary
reflections is one whereby questions about what things exist and what categories of
things there are cannot be answered separately. Rather, according to Wittgenstein and
Ramsey, the existence of things and their categories are progressively revealed together,
a posteriori, as the course of nature unfolds. So expressed, Wittgenstein and Ramsey
embrace a naturalistic approach to ontology. Naturalism has a familiar ring to us,
because we’re intellectually downstream from Quine. Categorial pluralism sounds
less familiar a doctrine. But if naturalism is congenial to us, should we not embrace
Wittgenstein and Ramsey’s outlook on ontology too? If we already embrace naturalism,
shouldn’t we bring our meta-ontology into harmony with our conception of meaning
and mind?5 And if we’re not already naturalists, an appreciation of Wittgenstein and
See his sister, Margaret Paul’s memoir of Ramsey (Paul 2012).

4
See MacBride 2014a and MacBride and Janssen-Lauret 2015 for arguments in favour of a naturalist
5
outlook on the categories from a contemporary perspective.

introduction 7
Ramsey’s arguments creates an epistemic context in which we cannot continue to

accept categorial dualism as an article of metaphysical faith. This book’s conclusion also
raises a new and surprising question for future work in the history of our discipline.
How did analytic philosophy manage to get from the naturalistic perspective achieved
in the early decades of the twentieth century to where we are now in the twenty-first,
where so many of us take the particular–universal distinction to be a priori?
1
Kantian Prequel
‘Idols of the Tribe’
1. Introduction
To understand the themes that the Zeitgeist played out through the development of
early analytic philosophy we need to get back to the works of Kant, that great sceptic
of unrestrained metaphysical speculation. To begin with this will enable us get to
grips with the early writings of G.E. Moore, writings where Moore explained and
developed his break with idealism. After reading Hegel for his Tripos examinations,
Moore had ‘never thought it worth while to read him again’; but he devoted two
years (1896–98), whilst working for a Prize Fellowship at Trinity, to ‘puzzling over
Kant’s three Critiques, his Prolegomena, and his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der
Sitten’.1 It was during this period that Moore spent puzzling over Kant that the lines
of the New Philosophy were laid down. It’s ironic that by 1899, Moore’s scheme was
itself to bear a family resemblance to Hegel’s own metaphysics, akin to absolute
idealism. But this isn’t so surprising since in a crucial respect Moore’s critique of
Kant recapitulated Hegel’s.
Going back to Kant won’t only provide us with novel insight into aspects of Moore’s
early scheme that have hitherto baffled his commentators. Placing Kant at the fore-
front of our attention will also help us understand what came next and thereafter, and
eventually enable us to appreciate the developmental process that culminated in the
ontology of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his conversations with the Vienna Circle.
Why so?
The answer lies with an intellectual episode that history forgot. That it was Kant,
following hints from Hume, who first problematized the concepts of substance and
attribute and the division between them; that in fact Kant argued that the dual
1
In this chapter I have endeavoured to approach Kant’s text as Moore did, unencumbered by subse-
quent disputes about the proper interpretation of Kant. However I have made use of three influential
English works of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century: Adamson’s Shaw Lectures on Kant
(1879), Caird’s two volume study of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1889) and Pritchard’s commentary on the
Critique Of Pure Reason (1909). We know from the preface to Moore’s 1898 dissertation that Moore con-
sulted both Caird and Adamson during the two-year period that he intensively studied Kant (Moore 1898:
117). Moore’s preface also tells us that he consulted the works of Fischer, B. Erdmann, J.H. Erdmann,
Cohen, and Vaihinger; but it is unclear the extent to which Moore was influenced by them.
Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 9
c oncepts of substance and attribute (or particular and universal) are no less problematic
from a justificatory point of view than Hume had found the concept of causation to be,
because fundamental judgements framed in terms of them are neither analytic nor a
posteriori but synthetic a priori. That’s why Kant placed the concepts of substance
and attribute alongside the concept of causation on his table of categories to await
transcendental justification—although Kant’s commentators typically overlook the
significance of the concepts of substance and attribute lying there on the table. The con-
cepts of substance and attribute (particular and universal) were to be deemed no less
problematic by the early analytic philosophers.
In this chapter I return to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegomena to recover
what history subsequently forgot: Kant’s reasons for problematizing the concepts of
substance and attribute and Kant’s flawed efforts to justify them transcendentally.
2. Synthetic A Priori Principles in Geometry,

Physics, and Metaphysics
In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant devoted himself to elucidating the difference between
concepts, such as fortune and fate, which have been ‘allowed to circulate by almost
universal indulgence’ and other concepts that perform a genuine and indispensable
role in our thinking about the world outside of us (A84/B116). Famously Hume had
questioned whether the concept of causation could be legitimately employed to
describe the external world; so far as Hume could establish, our use of the concept was
legitimated neither by experience nor reason. He diagnosed instead that it arose as a
non-rational product of association and custom. Kant agreed with Hume’s negative
conclusion—that the concept of causation couldn’t be legitimated by either of the
familiar vindicatory routes Hume had envisaged—but distanced himself from Hume’s
positive diagnosis. Kant refused to lump causation together with fortune and fate
because, he argued, by contrast to them, we do need to employ the concept of causation
as an instrument to convert the chaotic mass of fleeting data the senses deliver to us
into experience of an objective, law-governed world. Accordingly Kant countenanced
a third vindicatory route for concepts—a transcendental deduction that would estab-
lish the legitimacy of a concept by showing that without it experience of the world
would be impossible.
Now what has been left out of history is the fact that Kant argued that the concepts of
substance and attribute are no less problematic from the point of view of their justifica-
tion than Hume had conceived the concept of causation to be. Kant appreciated clearly
what followed. The concepts of substance and attribute require no less a transcendental
deduction to legitimate their use—if they cannot be vindicated by such a route then
substance and attribute should be thrown in the bucket with fortune and fate.
What had enabled Kant to achieve this insight was his realization that the particu-
lar problem that Hume had raised for causation was just an instance of a more general
10 Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’
problem that beset the justification of many other theoretical concepts we deploy in
our reasoning. Kant deemed to be both a universal and a necessary law that every event
has a cause—the Law of Causality. Kant had learnt a twofold lesson from Hume. That this
law cannot be established empirically because experience can only teach us that
something is the case ‘but not that it cannot be otherwise’ (A1/B3). But that it cannot
be otherwise cannot be established by reflecting solely upon the concepts that are
required for the expression of the law either. The concept of cause is neither contained
explicitly nor implicitly in the concept of event so we do not ensnare ourselves in
contradiction if we suppose that some event isn’t caused. The upshot: Kant’s causal law
cannot be justified a posteriori but it isn’t analytic either. But how discomfiting. If the
law is justified at all, it must be a priori. But how can it be justified a priori if it’s only
synthetic? What mechanism could possibly enable us to apprehend that concepts
that aren’t analytically connected cannot break free from their propositional orbits; that
concepts that aren’t such that one is contained in the other are still such that one invariably
tracks the other, however things turn out (A9/B13)? This gives us a sense of just how
difficult the general problem was that kept Kant awake at night after reading Hume:
how is it possible for necessary and universal synthetic judgements to be justified
independently of experience?
For Kant the Law of Causality wasn’t an outlier; he found many other examples of
judgements that even though they are synthetic he still took to be justified a priori.
He believed, for example, that the judgement space has exactly three dimensions
and the judgement that the quantity of matter in the Universe is always preserved
are synthetic a priori too (B16–18; Proleg: §12, 15). More generally he believed
that the Axioms of Euclidean Geometry and many of the Principles of Newtonian
Mechanics are synthetic a priori. This explains the urgency with which Kant addressed
the problem of how synthetic a priori judgements are possible. A solution to the
problem was needed straightaway because otherwise the theoretical edifice of
eighteenth-century mathematics and science—that Kant deemed to rely upon these
judgements—would be jeopardized.
Alongside the Law of Causality, the Axioms of Euclid and all the rest, Kant set forth
as further paradigms of synthetic a priori judgements certain metaphysical principles
governing substances and attributes in general. According to Kant, the principle that
all substances are permanent—that is, can neither come to be nor pass away—is syn-
thetic a priori (Proleg: §47). This principle is synthetic rather than analytic because the
concept of substance doesn’t contain the concept of permanence, as Kant understood
those concepts. He defined a substance as something ‘which exists only as a subject,
never as a predicate of something else’; correlatively an attribute is something that can
exist as a mere predicate (A147/B186). It cannot be drawn out of the concept of a sub-
ject which does not itself exist as the predicate of something else—an ‘ultimate’
subject—that it can neither come to be nor pass away. So we do not contradict ourselves
if we suppose a substance, that is, an ultimate subject, fails to be permanent. Still Kant
held the Principle of Permanence of Substance to be universal and necessary. Since
experience cannot teach us that something cannot be otherwise the Principle must
be a priori if it is justified.
The Principle of the Permanence of Substance is liable to strike us today as intelligible
but hardly a principle whose recognition is forced upon us. Why shouldn’t an ultim-
ate subject be capable of being expunged? We don’t contradict ourselves if we suppose
one just was. But, of course, this was just Kant’s point: that the Principle is synthetic,
analysis cannot warrant it; so establishing the Principle isn’t going to be a walk in the
park. The First Analogy gives us his best shot—where Kant argued that there’s no making
sense of our experience of temporal passage unless we presuppose that there is something
permanent in nature and we need the concept of substance to express this presuppos-
ition (B224–5). But what Kant appreciated more generally was the fact that other
metaphysical principles that are liable to appear more or less innocuous to us are really
no more mandated from the point of view of pure reason than the Principle of the
Permanence of Substance itself.
For Kant the concepts of substance and attribute were no more empirical in origin
than the concept of causation was for Hume. The concepts of red and round are empirical
because we can just see that some things are red and some things are round. But
we cannot just look and see whether something is a substance or an attribute—no
more than we can just look and see one event causes another. Hume had raised the
problem for causation that we can literally see that one event and then subsequently
see another, but not the necessity with which a given cause gives rise to a certain effect.
Kant agreed and added that we cannot see either that something is incapable of being
a predicate. Since it is a necessary condition of something’s being a substance that it
is incapable of being a predicate it follows that we cannot see whether something is a
substance or merely an attribute.
But even though we cannot see whether something is a substance or an attribute
Kant still held that whatever we see must either be a substance or an attribute. Call this
Kant’s Principle of Bifurcation. Because the concepts involved aren’t empirical, the
Principle cannot be established by appeal to experience. But still Kant held the Principle
‘forces itself upon us’ (B6). Kant invites us to imagine what the results would be of
performing a certain sort of metaphysical operation on any kind of empirical object
whatsoever: ‘if we remove from our empirical concept of any object, corporeal or
incorporeal, all properties which experience has taught us, we yet cannot take
away that property through which the object is thought as substance or as inhering
in a substance’ (B6). Take any object you like, you can strip away all of its empirical
features, but you won’t be able to take away its being a substance or its being something
that inheres in a substance (an attribute). We cannot think of it except as a substance
or an attribute; the Principle of Bifurcation ‘forces itself upon us’. But the Principle isn’t
analytic. It isn’t contradictory to deny that every possible object of experience is either
a substance or an attribute. The Principle of Bifurcation is synthetic.
At first glance the Principle might seem to be analytic because there are analytic
principles in the neighbourhood with which we may be liable to confuse it. For Kant it
is an analytic truth that a substance is an ultimate subject, whereas an attribute is a

mere predicate. Since an ultimate subject is defined as something that cannot itself be
a predicate of anything else, it follows analytically that no substance is an attribute. But
it doesn’t follow that any possible object, experienced or otherwise, is a substance or an
attribute. It’s analytic that if something is a substance then it’s an ultimate subject. But
it’s not analytic that anything is an ultimate subject (or an attribute of a substance). Mere
analysis of the concepts of substance and attribute, cannot establish that it is necessary
to those concepts to apply to what is given to us. Hence analysis of concepts, ‘reason
alone’ as Kant puts it, cannot provide us with insight into the application of the con-
cepts of substance and attribute; anymore than, as Hume pointed out, reason alone can
provide insight into the application of the concept of causation (Proleg: §27–8).
In fact Kant had a very clear-sighted appreciation that metaphysics cannot proceed
very far through analysis—that ‘analytic metaphysics’ is a misnomer. Analytic principles
are essentially ‘explicative’, breaking up a concept into its constituent elements. They are
useful because they can help us to appreciate clearly what we had confusedly thought
all along. But analytic principles are constitutively incapable of enabling us to do more
than rehearse what we knew already (albeit sometimes confusedly). So if metaphysics
is to lead to a genuine extension of our knowledge then it must eventually rely upon
synthetic principles that are ‘ampliative’, that forge new connections amongst concepts
where no amount of analysis could possibly extract one from the other (A10/B14). But
since the conjectures of metaphysics are usually understood to be universal and
necessary, and experience cannot teach us things could not be otherwise, these syn-
thetic principles must be a priori. So no metaphysician who proposes bold and surprising
principles to extend our knowledge can ultimately evade the responsibility of explain-
ing how they arrive at knowledge of such synthetic principles a priori. Addressing
himself to such a metaphysician, Kant issued a challenge that could not be negotiated
away, ‘You speak through pure reason, and presume as it were to create cognitions
a priori, not merely by analysing given concepts but by giving out that you are making
new connections, which do not rest on the principle of contradiction, and you believe
to have insight into them independently of all experience; how do you arrive at all
this and how will you justify such pretensions?’ (Proleg: §5). Kant added that synthetic
a priori principles aren’t any less problematic, if, instead of being bold and surprising,
they comport with common sense, ‘You cannot be permitted to appeal to the con-
sent of common sense, for this is a witness whose reputation only rests on public
humour’ (did the youthful Moore sit up in his armchair as he read this passage in the
Prolegomena?).
The concepts of substance and attribute are not only problematic for Kant because
they are bound up with synthetic a priori principles. Substance and attribute aren’t
empirical concepts acquired by abstraction from experience. They are rather, as Kant
described them, concepts of pure understanding. But precisely because they have no
experiential content whatsoever this makes it difficult to understand how it is possible
to apply substance and attribute to what is given in experience. Kant draws a distinction
between concepts that are homogeneous with the objects that fall under them and
heterogeneous concepts that aren’t. A concept is homogeneous if ‘the concept con-
tains something which is represented in the object that is to be subsumed under it’
(A137/B176). So the concept of a circle is homogeneous with a circular plate because
to understand the concept is straightaway to grasp a rule for applying the concept to the
spatial objects experience gives us—we can see that it’s a circular plate because all
the points on its edge are a given distance from a given point, its centre. But the concepts
of substance and attribute aren’t homogeneous with the objects that fall under them.
Understanding these concepts doesn’t supply a rule for settling whether this or
that empirical object is a substance or an attribute. Experience of an object doesn’t
settle whether it fulfils the highly abstract condition of being an ultimate subject:
‘Substance . . . would mean simply a something which can be thought only as a
subject, never as a predicate of something else. Such a representation I can put to no use,
for it tells me nothing as to the nature of that which is thus to be viewed as a primary
subject’ (A147/B186–7).
An alternative universe: Kant completes his critical labours at this point. He has
established that the traditional Aristotelian metaphysic of substance and attribute
rested upon dubious foundations (synthetic a priori) and that the concepts of substance
and attribute lack operational criteria for their application. The Principle of Bifurcation
is dropped along with the Principle of Causality. Together with Hume, Kant goes down
in history as the great destroyer of metaphysical systems. Subsequently Aristotelian
metaphysics went the way of Euclidean Geometry and Newtonian Mechanics.
3. The Copernican Revolution

For good or for ill, Kant didn’t quit whilst he was ahead. His big idea was to put
everything right with a ‘Copernican Revolution’. Until Copernicus, astronomers
assumed that the heavens revolved around the earth; but with this assumption in place
they could make no progress explaining celestial motion. Copernicus’s revolutionary
hypothesis: it is we, terrestrial observers, who are moving. Equipped with this hypothesis
Copernicus successfully accounted for the appearances of the heavens from the earth
as the mutual upshot of the earth and the other planets revolving around the sun. It was
key to Copernicus’s successful explanation of the astronomical appearances that we make
an integral contribution to those appearances through our own motion. This inspired
Kant’s own version of a Copernican Revolution. He speculated that no progress had
been made explaining how synthetic a priori judgements are possible because it had been
assumed that external objects have their nature fixed irrespective of our cognition of
them. To make progress he suggested that the Principle of Causality etc. force themselves
upon us a priori even though they are synthetic because they reflect the unconscious
procedures whereby we construct our representations of objects from the crude
deliverances of the senses.
It follows from Kant’s account of synthetic a priori principles that ‘we can know
a priori of things only what we ourselves put in them’ (Bxviii). But doesn’t this just
amount to the offer of a poisoned chalice to metaphysicians minded to endorse
synthetic a priori principles about causation, substance, and attribute? Wasn’t Kant
just acknowledging that these principles force themselves upon us because they
reflect features of our innate cognitive constitution rather than the nature of things
outside of us? If so, Kant’s defence of the synthetic a priori does nothing to support
the Principle of Causality, the Principle of Bifurcation, and so on—at least insofar as those
principles are intended to be factual descriptions of a world whose nature is fixed
independently of us.
Nonetheless Kant held that the concepts of causation, substance, and attribute aren’t
anomalous or dispensable features of our cognitive architecture. Experience would be
impossible if we didn’t make use of these concepts because then our inner lives wouldn’t
amount to more than a bag of ideas connected by arbitrary laws of association. Kant’s
Transcendental Deduction is intended to vindicate our employment of these concepts
by demonstrating that they indeed have this significance for our cognition.
4. The Forms of Judgement and the Categories

Because it purports to show that these concepts must be employed if experience
belonging to a unified consciousness is to be possible at all, the Transcendental
Deduction marks the most thoroughgoing and ambitious defence of the concepts of
substance and attribute in history. But there’s no need here for us to become entangled
in the details of Kant’s metapsychology or the relationship between the different
versions of the Transcendental Deduction that Kant left us. The historically significant
respect in which Kant’s overall strategy for vindicating these concepts fell far short can
be made out without our having to drop too close to treacherous ground.
One central line of argument that runs through the Transcendental Deduction can
be sketched in the following terms. The mental life of a creature capable of keeping
track of its own states (‘transcendental unity of apperception’) cannot consist solely in
a succession of representations. It has to take ownership of them, which means being
able to appreciate that they are all states of one and the same subject (A116/B131–2).
Taking ownership cannot consist in simply being aware that each representation belongs
to the same self, because we only ever encounter manifestations of the self, rather than
the self itself (A107). Ultimately, Kant held that the ability to take ownership of our
representations relies upon the ability to make judgements about them. This is because
the ability to comprehend a manifold of diverse representations as one unified
whole (‘synthesis’) is essentially the same as the ability we exercise when we make a
single judgement about them (A79/B104–5). As Kant telegraphically made the point in
the Prolegomena, ‘The union of representations in one consciousness is judging’(§22).
But, according to Kant, judgement is only possible if we are able to apply what he called
‘the pure concepts of the understanding’, or ‘the categories’, to what is given to us to

make judgements—where the categories include causation, substance, and attribute
amongst other concepts. So it is only possible for a self-conscious creature to keep
track of its own states if it has the ability to apply these categories to make judgements
about what is given to it (A125/B143). The self realizes its own unity through the appli-
cation of the categories.
To reach this conclusion Kant draws upon results concerning the nature of judge-
ment that he considered himself to have already established in a preceding section of
the Critique, the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories. For Kant all empirical
knowledge arises out of co-operation between two mental faculties, sensibility and
understanding, that is, between experiential uptake on the one hand and the applica-
tion of concepts on the other (A19/B33). It’s upon the field of possible judgements that
sensibility and understanding play out their respective roles. Objects are given to us by
means of the ‘intuitions’ sensibility supplies, that is, singular representations that relate
immediately to their objects.
Now Kant made it a controlling assumption about concepts that to apply one is to
make a judgement by means of it—every concept may be regarded as a predicate of a
possible judgement. A concept is applied to an object given to us when the intuition
that represents the object and the concept in question are brought together in a rela-
tion whereby the judgement is formed that the object given falls under the concept
(A68/B93).
What Kant argued in the Metaphysical Deduction was that when we apply an
empirical concept to something given to us to make a judgement, we presuppose the
application of a pure concept of the understanding. This is the very general concept
(category) that corresponds to the formal manner in which the judgement is built up
from its constituent representations. Such a concept is pure in the sense that it is used
whenever we make a judgement that exhibits that formal feature, however much the
topic may otherwise vary. So if Kant could supply us with an exhaustive inventory of
the formal features of judgement then he would have supplied us—if we’d followed
Kant thus far—the basis for an exhaustive inventory of the categories. We would have
an explanation of ‘why just those concepts, and no others have their seat in the pure
understanding’ (A81/B107). But unless the Metaphysical Deduction succeeds in pro-
viding such an inventory the Transcendental Deduction cannot carry through to
completion—it cannot establish that experience is only possible if exactly these are
the categories applied.
In fact, looking back, Kant was to remain absolutely certain about the completeness
of the list of categories he had put together. ‘I knew beyond doubt that exactly
these, and only so many of them, neither more nor less, could constitute our whole
knowledge of things out of pure understanding’ (Proleg: §39). Kant’s certainty arose
from his prior conviction that the task of supplying an exhaustive inventory of
the logical forms of possible judgements was ‘easily done’ (A69/B94). But really it is
one of the most difficult things to do, perhaps the most difficult. The history of early
a nalytic philosophy might be described as an unfolding realization that the task

was impossibly difficult.
Kant’s straightforward idea for coming up with an inventory of forms was to abstract
from all the empirical content of our judgements; he claimed that was what was left
behind by the abstraction process were exactly twelve formal features that judgement
are capable of exhibiting. Kant classified these formal features under the four headings
‘Quantity’, ‘Quality’, ‘Relation’, and ‘Modality’ and he maintained that every judgement
must exhibit exactly one of the three features that falls under each of these headings.
Each judgement must have some form of quantity: it must be universal, particular,
or singular. Each judgement must have some form of quality: it must be affirmative,
negative, or infinite. Each judgement must have some form of modality: it must be
either problematic, assetoric, or apodeictic. It’s the third heading that’s most relevant
to the concepts whose application concerns us. Kant took it that every judgement
must have some relation, by which Kant meant that the judgement must either have
a categorical, a hypothetical, or a disjunctive form. From these three judgement
forms Kant derived the three categories that he labelled ‘Inherence and Subsistence’,
‘Causality and Dependence’, and ‘Community’ (A79/B105).
It’s a significant fact that Kant labelled these categories as relational and its signifi-
cance wasn’t lost upon Moore and Russell. The first of these categories Kant also called
‘substantia et accidens’, the second, ‘cause and effect’ and the third ‘reciprocity of agent
and patient’ to make perspicuous their binary status as categories of relation. Kant
later picked out these categories as ‘dynamic’ meaning that they are concerned with
necessary connexions amongst the elements that these concepts are used to describe
(A160/B199–200). What he had in mind was that there is no applying one side of a
relational category without (explicitly or implicitly) applying the other; their applications
cannot be conceived independently of one another. We cannot judge something to be a
cause without presupposing that something else is an effect of it, anymore that we can
judge that something is an effect without presupposing that something else is its cause.
We cannot judge that something is an agent without presupposing that something is
acted upon by it (a patient), anymore than we can judge that something is a patient
without presupposing that something acted upon it (an agent). Similarly we cannot
judge that something is a substance without presupposing that something else is an
attribute of it; anymore that we can judge that something is an attribute without pre-
supposing that something else is a substance that has the attribute in question. Kant
thereby continued a tradition of thought about substance and attribute that he shared
with Hume and which can be traced back to Aristotle.2 One noteworthy consequence
is that for Kant it’s misleading to talk—as indeed we have done until now—as though
substance and attribute were two separate concepts, capable of enjoying a life inde-
pendently of one another. It’s just as misleading to talk of cause and effect, or agent
2
See Aristotle, Metaphysics Z, 1 and Hume, Treatise of Human Understanding, Book I, Sec. IV, 3.
and patient, as separate categories capable of a life apart. This made it entirely fitting
that Kant recognized one category rather than two for substance and attribute.
5. How the Metaphysical Deduction Fell Short

The immediate questions about the Metaphysical Deduction that need to be raised are:
(1) Did Kant indeed succeed in providing an exhaustive enumeration of the formal
features of judgement? (2) Did Kant succeed in deriving the categories from the
formal features he listed? Of course both these questions were to become very pressing
for Kant’s successors, from Reinhold onward.
Kant claimed that his list of the formal features of judgement was developed system-
atically from reflection upon the nature of judgement itself. In this way he took himself
to have made an advance upon Aristotle (A81/B107). Aristotle’s list of categories
appears to have arisen from reflection upon the different types of question that one
might ordinarily ask about a thing—‘What is it?’, ‘What is it like?’, ‘How big?’, and so on.
But Kant’s claim to have been more systematic than Aristotle appears overblown. The
highly schematic account of judgement that Kant provided, that judgement essentially
involves subsuming what is given to us in experience under concepts, doesn’t inevitably
unfold into the variety of logical features that he lays out for us.3 This account of judge-
ment and concepts may have been well suited to performing an important negative
role, helping rule out theories according to which judgements are mere associations of
ideas; but it is ill suited to performing the positive role of determining just what specific
forms judgements must take.
It is perfectly true that we can come up with examples of judgements that behave
themselves Kant-wise, exhibiting one feature from under each of Kant’s four headings,
as Kant’s theory predicts. The judgement, for example, that all bodies are heavy is
universal, affirmative, categorical, and assertoric. But Kant denied that his inventory of
forms could be satisfactorily established by reflecting upon examples that happen to have
come our way; such an inductive procedure could never guarantee the completeness
of the enumeration at which he had arrived. We can get some intuitive sense of the
thinking behind Kant’s catalogue of judgement forms if we conceive of what we do when
we make a judgement as making a claim about how attributes inhere in substances
(relation). In that case when we make a judgement we will either affirm or deny (quality)
that an attribute holds of all, some, or none of the substances (quantity) either necessarily,
possibly, or actually (modality). This assumes that whenever we make a judgement we
are making a claim about how attributes inhere in substances. But don’t forget that
the whole point of the Metaphysical Deduction is to demonstrate that we cannot judge
without applying the concepts of substance and attribute (amongst others) to what is
given to us. The Metaphysical Deduction can hardly establish this result if it is already
3
A concern emphasized by Caird 1889: 308–9 in his treatment of the Metaphysical Deduction. See also
Prichard 1909: 152.
assumed at the outset that what we do when we make a judgement is to make a claim
about how attributes inhere in substances—however easy it may be for a subject who
already thinks in terms of such categories to take that assumption for granted.
Kant himself appears later to have doubted whether he could indeed make good upon
his promise in the Metaphysical Deduction to establish the categories ‘systematically
from a common principle, namely the faculty of judgment’, that is, provide a deduction
that would explain ‘why just those concepts, and no others, have their seat in the pure
understanding’ (A81/B106). In fact Kant appears to have come to realize that it is
simply an ultimate and inexplicable fact about the cognitive make-up of human beings
that our judgements have the forms that they do: ‘The peculiarity of our understanding,
that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and
only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just
these and no other functions of judgment’ (B145–6).
Perhaps this later remark tells us that we shouldn’t take too seriously the rhetoric
of the Metaphysical Deduction—because Kant only ever meant to assemble the formal
features that, as a matter of brute fact, our judgements exhibit. But it doesn’t matter
how exactly Kant conceived, or came to conceive, the design brief of the Metaphysical
Deduction, whether in terms of establishing that such-and-such are all the forms that
judgements could ever exhibit, or merely in terms of laying out that such-and-such are
the forms our judgements actually exhibit. The insufficiency of Kant’s arguments to
realize the ambition of the former design, and the modesty of the latter, both open
the door to acknowledging the possibility of other creatures endowed with a different
cognitive constitution to our own, creatures whose judgements exhibit forms that aren’t
anywhere on Kant’s list—the possibility that the categories aren’t inevitable after all.
No doubt Kant was unduly influenced in his actual framing of his catalogue of forms
by an ingrained habit of thinking along Aristotelian lines. He infamously remarked
that since Aristotle, logic had been ‘a closed and completed body of doctrine’ (Bviii).
But the fact that Aristotle’s logic had stood the test of time for over two thousand years
does make it intelligible why Kant should have thought that Aristotle had succeeded
in laying bare the fundamental operations of thought. Nonetheless Kant’s confidence
turned out to be misplaced. Aristotelian logic was destined to be overtaken by nineteenth-
century developments in logic and mathematics.4 This logical revolution rendered
perspicuous forms of judgement involving generality that Kant’s catalogue had failed
to adequately represent. But a reader of Kant doesn’t need to be abreast of these technical
developments in order to notice that Kant’s catalogue is deficient because it already
fails to distinguish between singular judgements of different forms. It fails, for example,
to distinguish attributive judgements (Socrates is pale) from relational judgements
(Socrates loves Xanthippe) lumping them together as categorical. But if we distinguish
4
See Frege (1879) and Peirce (1883) for their treatments of the calculus of relations that overturned
Aristotelian logic. Whilst these works are now famous, back in 1898 neither Moore nor Russell had read
them. But De Morgan (1847) had already published criticisms of Aristotle and the traditional logic in
English and conveniently in Cambridge. No doubt worries about Aristotle’s logic were in the air.
between attributive and relational judgement forms then we can’t make do with just
the concepts of substance and attribute to correspond to them. It will be necessary to
admit more categories when we make judgements that exhibit these different forms—
substance and attribute won’t do by themselves.
The upshot so far: the Metaphysical Deduction has come under pressure from two
sides. Kant hasn’t demonstrated that his catalogue of judgement forms comprises the
forms of all possible judgements. Nor has he established that his catalogue includes
the forms of all actual judgements. Up until this point we have given Kant the benefit
of the doubt and allowed the assumption to pass that he is entitled to derive the categor-
ies from the formal features of judgements. Our ultimate concern is with the relational
category of substantia et accidens. Did Kant succeed in deriving this category from the
form of categorical judgements? If Kant failed in this task then he also failed to address
his own generalized Humean scepticism about the intelligibility of the concepts of
substance and attribute.
Recall that Kant defined a substance as something ‘which exists only as a subject,
never as a predicate of something else’ whilst an attribute is defined as something that
can exist as a predicate (A147/B186)). Since the concepts of substance and attribute
are defined using the formal-grammatical notions in terms of which a judgement
is understood to be categorical in the first place, the transition between form and
category, at least in this case, is liable to appear more or less immediate. To cognitively
assemble a categorical judgement requires us to conceive of something as a subject, as
something capable of bearing attributes. Success in assembling such a judgement
also requires us to reciprocally conceive of something else in terms of its performing a
predicative role, as an attribute capable of being borne by the subject. It follows that the
capacity to make a categorical judgement presupposes the capacity to distinguish
between a subject and the attributes it bears. The problem for Kant is that this line of
reflection doesn’t yield the Kantian category of substantia et accidens.
The envisaged derivation only tells us that we must distinguish, when we exercise
our capacity to make a categorical judgement, between a subject that has attributes and
the attributes it has. But it may be questioned whether a subject (so conceived) need be
anything over and above its attributes. In other words, even if we accept Kant’s account
of the abilities that we exercise when we make a categorical judgement, it is still possible
to conceive of a subject as a bundle of attributes, thereby dispensing altogether with
the concept of substance as an integral feature of the substantia et accidens package.
In The Nature of Existence McTaggart pointed out one difficulty with this dispensability
argument: when we judge of Lincoln that he is tall, we don’t judge that the bundle of his
attributes is tall—no bundle of attributes has the attribute of being tall, but Lincoln
does.5 This makes bundles of attributes ill suited to performing the subject role with
respect to categorical judgements about Lincoln et al. But from the fact that we don’t
conceive of Lincoln as a bundle of attributes when we make a categorical judgement
5
See McTaggart 1921: §66.
about him, it doesn’t follow that Lincoln isn’t an attribute of something else. From the
fact that we conceive of Lincoln as a subject when we make a categorical judgement
about him, it doesn’t follow that we also have to conceive of him as an ultimate subject,
as incapable of being an attribute of something else. Contra Kant, it is questionable
whether there is any need for us to employ the concept of an ultimate subject (substance)
whenever we exercise our capacity to make categorical judgements.
It was Kant that impressed upon us the need to legitimate the use of the concepts of
substance and attribute in the light of their non-empirical character. But it’s difficult
to avoid the impression that Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction, and consequently his
Transcendental Deduction, really fall far short of validating the concepts of substance
and attribute. But there’s an alternative line of interpretation of the Metaphysical
Deduction, put forward by Prichard in Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (1909), which
suggests that this is too grave an assessment.6 We’ve seen that Kant conceived of
judgement in terms of the interplay between sensibility and understanding. To judge,
for Kant, is to conceptualize our experiential uptake—to subsume an intuition under a
concept. Prichard found implicit in this account of judgement a commitment to the
categories of particular and universal. According to Prichard’s interpretation, when we
make an empirical judgement, an intuition representing a particular object is brought
together with a concept standing for a universal. Reasoning along these lines Prichard
arrived at the general conclusion that ‘according to Kant, a judgment unifies particulars
by bringing them under a universal’ (1909: 151).
Alas, Prichard didn’t say what he took the categories of particular and universal to be,
except that they differ in their extensions, nor how he understood them to stand to
Kant’s category of substantia et accidens. Certainly Prichard shouldn’t have identified
them. By Kant’s design, the latter category is only brought to bear when a categorical
judgement is made, whereas Prichard placed the former categories at the service of
judgement in general. What deserves emphasis right now is that Kant’s distinction
between ‘intuition’ and ‘concept’ won’t bear the weight that Prichard places upon it.
For Kant the distinction is one between two different styles of representations. In his
Lectures on Logic Kant distinguished between them by saying, ‘Concept is opposed to
intuition, for it is a general presentation or a presentation of what is common to several
objects’.7 This leaves open the possibility that what is singularly represented as an object
by an intuition in one judgement may be represented by a concept in another judgement
as what is common to other objects. The distinction between two styles of representation,
singular and general, doesn’t by itself guarantee that the representations have different
subject matters. But the deeper objection to Prichard’s interpretation of Kant’s theory
6
Prichard (1909: iv) attributed his interpretation of Kant to Cook Wilson. A similar assessment of what
the Metaphysical Deduction really achieved was subsequently proposed by Strawson in Bounds of Sense
(1966: 82). This way of conceiving the relationship between judgement and the categories of particular and
universal emanates throughout Strawson’s later philosophy. His Subject and Predicate in Logic and
Grammar is founded on this apparent insight (Strawson 1974: 14).
7
See Kant 1800: I, §1.
of judgement has to be that it is empty. The bare description of judgement as the

activity of bringing particulars under universals doesn’t unfold in any satisfying sense
into a description of the more determinate forms that judgement assumes—such as
the judgement forms that Kant catalogues. We have to rely upon the more determinate
forms taking care of themselves. But insofar as this theory of judgement is empty the
support that it provides for the categories of particular and universal is negligible.
Perhaps Kant, in his own way, came to appreciate the limitations of the Transcendental
Deduction as he had presented it. Perhaps he came to understand that the notion of
judgement to which he had appealed was hopelessly abstract for the vindicatory task
at hand. It’s noteworthy that Kant offered the following observation upon his attempts
to derive the categories from a consideration of what makes a unified consciousness
possible: that so far only ‘a beginning is made of deduction of the pure concepts of the
understanding’ (B144). What, according to Kant, was needed to truly vindicate the use
of substance, attribute, causation etc. was an account of how these concepts actually
earned their keep in the cognitive economy of creatures like us. For Kant this meant
explaining how using these categories enables us to comprehend the world in the spatial
and temporal modes in which we actually experience it. Kant took up the burden of
explaining how these concepts enable us to comprehend the world as a world of space
and time in the Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding and the
Analogies of Experience.
An important part of what made the concepts of substance and attribute problematic
for Kant in the first place was (recall) that they are heterogeneous from what is given to
us in the field of experience. These concepts are so general and abstract that even a full
grasp of them won’t provide us with a rule for settling whether this or that object given
in experience falls under them. So how can we apply the concepts of substance and
attribute to what we experience in a manner that isn’t entirely arbitrary? In the
Schematism Kant answered that the problem is solved if we interleaf a further layer of
representational material, a schema, between a pure concept of the understanding and
its subject matter, where a schema is understood as a rule for applying the pure concept
(A141/B180). According to Kant, the schema of substance is ‘permanence of the real in
time’, that is, the schematized concept of substance applies to whatever abides as a
subject in our experience of time whilst all else changes (A143/B183).
The First Analogy is devoted to explaining why the concept of a permanent substance
performs an indispensable role in enabling us to marshal our experiential uptake. Kant
offers two complementary arguments for this conclusion (B229/B231–2). According
to the first, we need the concept of a permanent substance to understand how it is
possible for us to experience the world as a succession of events in a unitary network of
temporal relations. Since we don’t experience time itself we must draw upon some
other facet of our experience to represent the unity of time. Since only what itself abides
through all time and change is capable of representing this unity, Kant concludes that
there must indeed be something permanent in our experience that performs this
representational function. Of course this argument is open to the challenge that a
s uccession of relatively enduring things, so long as there is sufficient overlap amongst

them to form a unitary network, provides all the representation of the unity of time
we need.8
According to Kant’s second argument, we cannot experience a change happening
unless it consists in the alteration of an underlying subject, transitioning from one
state to another. Suppose that something occurred that wasn’t a shift in the state of a
pre-existing substance but an absolute coming to be of a novel substance. To experience
this radical form of change we would have to represent an empty time before the (novel)
substance came into being. But we cannot represent an empty time, so there must have
been something that existed prior to the coming to be of the novel substance that we
are able to represent. Kant concludes that ‘if we connect the coming to be with things
which previously existed, and which persist in existence up to the moment of this com-
ing to be, this latter must simply be a determination of what is permanent in that which
precedes it’ (A188/B231). As Kant states his point he begs the question because it
hardly follows from the fact that we need something to represent time before a change
that the change in question consists in the alteration (‘determination’) of what existed
prior to the change taking place. Perhaps Kant had in mind the need for us to do more
than simply represent the time before a change occurs, namely the need to provide a
basis for distinguishing between successive representations of co-existing things and
successive representations of things where one replaces the other. Conceiving of the
latter as consisting in the representation of the successive states of an enduring sub-
stance goes some way towards fulfilling this need. But since this need might also be
fulfilled, for all that has been established so far, by taking note of the systematic and
law-like regularities that hold between the states of the relatively enduring things given
to us and the states of our own bodies, this still fails to establish that the posit of a
permanent, underlying substance is indispensable to orchestrating our experience
of change. Since the indispensability of the concept of substance still remains to be
established, our use of the concept remains correspondingly open to question.
6. Conclusion
This all sets Kant in a new light. Here, to put the pieces together, is the novel interpretation
I’ve proposed. For Kant the fundamental principles governing substances and attributes
are synthetic a priori, so no less epistemologically precarious than the Principle of
Causality or the Axioms of Euclidean Geometry. Kant endeavoured to safeguard the
credibility of these principles by his Copernican Revolution. This meant validating
these principles by demonstrating that they performed an indispensable role in the
conceptual orchestration of our experiential uptake. But this meant transducing them
8
Caird offered the more radical criticism that there is no need to guarantee the unity of time in the
first place: ‘A perpetual flux would therefore sufficiently “represent” all the permanence there is in time’
(see his 1889: 500).
from reflection upon the nature of judgement itself and here things didn’t work out
well for Kant because he could not supply, despite his best efforts and initial optimism,
an exhaustive catalogue of the formal features of possible judgement. In other words,
the Metaphysical Deduction was a failure. Rear-guard efforts by Kant to establish the
need to posit a sempiternal substance to represent the unity of time, or to enable us to
represent the passing show, the arguments of his First Analogy, failed to carry conviction.
So Kant placed a large question mark over our justification for using the concepts of
substance and attribute but couldn’t rub it out afterwards; having awoken us from our
dogmatic slumbers with respect to the concepts of substance and attribute Kant failed
to restore confidence in their employment.
One intriguing feature of this interpretation is that Kant’s concerns about the
concepts of substance and attribute are more remarkable, because they run far deeper,
than more familiar forms of scepticism about either substances on the one hand or
attributes on the other. We’re familiar enough with scepticism about attributes, that
pushes us towards nominalism, and scepticism about substances, reasons for conceiving
concrete things as bundles of attributes. But Kant’s concerns were altogether more pro-
found because he held that the concepts of substance and attribute are incapable of
being pulled apart. They are inseparable aspects of a local holism; because they are
given to us as a package deal there’s no picking and choosing, only accepting the deal or
rejecting them both. So if Kant is right many familiar forms of nominalism and realism
make no sense, because we cannot make sense of something lying on one side of the
substance–attribute distinction without admitting something else lying on the other.
But we’ve also seen that Kant failed to justify our use of the substance–attribute holism,
because the Metaphysical Deduction fell short and so on. This opens up the possibility
of a more profound form of scepticism whereby we have no choice but to reject the
holism outright. Appreciating this possibility, an epistemic eventuality that is neither
nominalist nor realist, enables us to make sense of Moore’s early system for the first
time; so I will argue. His early system is neither nominalist nor realist by design because
Moore had read Kant.
2
Moore’s Early Philosophy
‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’
1. Introduction
After two years spent in the bathtub of idealism debating with Kant, Moore decided it
was time to get out. He did and the result was revolutionary: the inauguration of a ‘new
philosophy’ that opened up possibilities for the development of human thought along
hitherto unforeseen lines. In certain respects the New Philosophy was unabashedly realist
in outlook. In the final analysis, Moore declaimed, cognition involves pressing our
noses right up against a reality that exists independently of us—there’s no windowpane
from behind which we watch the passing scene. But what made the New Philosophy
genuinely a new philosophy was that it opened up the possibility of a precise account
of levels of analysis that aren’t final, levels at which our cognitive states succeed in
encoding objective information about the reality outside of us even though they bear
only an indirect relationship to it. Russell’s discovery of the theory of descriptions
was to provide a paradigm of this conception of analysis, an account of symbols that
bear objective significance because they are incomplete, that is, because they are
fragments of statements that en bloc are equivalent to statements whose constituent’
expressions do figure in direct relationships with what there is.
Kant hankered for a Transcendental Deduction to validate the employment of
concepts whose contribution, as Hume had pointed out, cannot be keyed directly
to our experience. Kant’s own efforts towards deducing the pure concepts of the
understanding ran into the ground. The New Philosophy offered an altogether different
account of how words and phrases can be keyed to experience even though their
relationship to experience isn’t direct—because they are incomplete symbols. This is
what enabled the New Philosophy to be not only realist but also a realistic rival to
Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Moore’s denial that the Kantian category of substantia
et accidens informed reality was an important step along the path because it implies that
ordinary subject–predicate statements don’t correspond to what there is but nevertheless
convey truths about reality.
The ontology of Moore’s early scheme cannot be understood in isolation. For the
early Moore, questions about substances, attributes etc. weren’t a separate question on
the examination paper, never mind a compulsory one. His particular views on ontology
Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’ 25
can only be understood against the backdrop of his more general scheme. It’s because
Moore’s views on ontology have been approached in isolation that his views have b affled
and been misunderstood by his commentators. In this chapter I begin the hermeneutic
task, to be completed in the next, of elucidating the general scheme of the early Moore
and then elucidating his particular views on substance and attribute in context. What
is needed to comprehend early Moore isn’t merely a grasp of one or two passages, more
a sense of the intellectual momentum that drove him forward.
2. The Revolt against Idealism

There was no unique Eureka moment when Moore leapt out of the idealist bathtub—and
he ended up having more than one reason for getting out. In fact Moore went through
a process of gradually unencumbering himself of the commitments of Kant’s philosophy.
When Moore submitted his first dissertation in 1897, his outlook was still idealist.
‘Freedom’, a paper, so far as we can tell, copied and pasted from this dissertation, had
Moore describing Kant as the philosopher with whom he was ‘most in agreement’
(1898a: 179). Moore’s second, and successful, dissertation submitted in 1898 was the
transitional work in which Moore distanced himself in certain respects but not others
from Kant. This dissertation, as well as incorporating material from its predecessor,
contained a new chapter on ‘Reason’. Moore had hitherto been perplexed by Kant’s
use of the notion of Reason but thought to cast light on it by exploring the relationship
of this notion to another, Truth. So Moore included in the chapter a discussion of
Truth that led, as these things do, to a discussion of Meaning. He argued that the
meaning of an idea was something wholly mind-independent. As Moore recalled
in his Autobiography, ‘this was the beginning, I think, of certain tendencies in me
which have led some people to call me a “Realist” ’ (1942: 22). In fact Moore had hit
upon what he described in an excited letter to his friend Desmond McCarthy at
the time as ‘the most Platonic system of modern times’.1 As Moore later recalled: ‘The
substance of the new chapter was published soon afterwards in Mind under the title
of “The Nature of Judgment” ’ (1942: 22). It was the publication of what was effectively
a position paper in 1899 that Russell also recalled as the historical entry point for
the New Philosophy.2 Having secured his Fellowship, Moore finished his hatchet
job on idealism with a double blow, his ‘Refutation of Idealism’ (1903), which was
destined to become one of the most famous and influential articles of early twentieth-
century philosophy, and ‘Kant’s Idealism’ (1903–04), a critique of Kant’s Copernican
Revolution.
Delving deeper into the historical strata, it turns out that these anti-idealist arguments
are refinements and embellishments of material drawn from the first chapter of
1
See Moore to Desmond McCarthy, 14 August 1898. The letter is held with Moore’s papers in the
Cambridge University Library.
2
See Russell 1959: 42.
26 Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’
Moore’s 1898 dissertation (‘On the Meaning of “Reason” in Kant’); evidently Moore
had forgotten this when he recalled over forty years later that his realist tendencies had
only begun when he wrote the second chapter. The idea behind Kant’s Copernican
Revolution, his ‘happy thought’, was to explain how we can have knowledge of synthetic
a priori propositions by inferring them from premises about how our innate cognitive
mechanisms function; according to Kant, this is the vindicatory route we have to take
because, ‘nothing in a priori knowledge can be ascribed to objects save what the thinking
subject derives from itself ’ (Bxxiii). In his 1898 dissertation Moore had hit upon two
lines of enduring criticism of Kant’s Copernican Revolution.
(1) Moore’s first criticism emphasized the limited potential of transcendental
arguments to establish conclusions about what’s the case outside of our mental
set-up. Moore pointed out that even if Kant can establish that we are programmed
to think about the world, or be conscious of it, in a certain way, it doesn’t follow
that the way we think reflects the way things are, ‘For there may be fairly urged
against him the question: How can he prove the proposition, that what is
necessary to consciousness is true’? (1898: 148). Or, as Moore later refurbished
the point, ‘From the fact that we always think a thing it certainly does not
follow that what we think is true’ (1903–04: 136).3
(2) According to Moore’s second line of criticism, Kant’s Copernican Revolution
cannot provide a satisfactory account of the necessity of the categories. Kant,
recall, was forced to admit that it is a brute, inexplicable fact about us that
our minds are constituted to operate by means of the categories (B145–6).
Reflecting upon this passage, Moore came up with a dilemma for Kant. On
the one hand, if it is only contingent that our minds are programmed to use the
categories then it cannot be inferred from this fact that necessarily everything
presented to us will conform to the categories—because our minds might have
been programmed differently and run a different set of categories. In Moore’s
own words, Kant presumed ‘to deduce necessity from a mere fact, namely that
our mind is so and so constituted, and this, on Kant’s own principles effectually
excludes the propositions deduced from any claim to be absolutely necessary’
(1898: 151). But, on the other hand, if it is necessary that mind operates
according to the categories then Kant has failed to explain how synthetic a pri-
ori principles are possible. What makes these principles problematic from the
start is their necessity and universality. Inferring them from other necessary
and universal principles, synthetic a priori propositions about the mind,
doesn’t discharge but only postpones the task of explaining how it is possible
for synthetic principles to be necessary and universal (1898: 153). Kant
assumes that the mind always acts in a certain manner but it follows, as Moore
continued to press Kant later, ‘that there is one universal proposition, at least,
3
This is, of course, a now popular line of reservation about the effectiveness of transcendental arguments
that we associate with Stroud (1968).
which Kant has given us no title to believe; that, therefore, Kant has not, in his
own words, “explained the possibility of all synthetic propositions a priori” ’
(1903–04: 133).
The two arguments that Moore pressed against Kant’s Copernican Revolution
have been victims of their own success. Deploying only minimal resources they raise
serious questions for transcendental idealism. They’re questions that are so familiar
now, we’ve incorporated them into the lexicon of our philosophical culture, that it’s
easy to skim over them without appreciating their significance for the development
of the New Philosophy. By contrast, ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, a paper that captivated
a generation at the time, is bold enough to still take us by surprise.
Ideas and sensations are to be found in the heartland of idealism. These are mind
dependent states, if any are. So if it can be established that we cannot break out from
behind the circle of our own ideas and sensations then it appears the idealists have
won. Moore’s radical strategy in ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ was to argue that idealism
is an inherently unstable position. It pulls apart because introspection of the mental
states that belong to the idealists’ heartland already reveals to us a reality that isn’t
mind-dependent. ‘There is therefore no question of how we are “to get outside the circle
of our own ideas and sensations”. Merely to have a sensation is already to be outside that
circle. It is to know something which is as truly and really not a part of my experiences,
as anything which I can ever know’ (1903: 451).
Moore’s commentators have often described Moore’s anti-idealism by saying that,
for Moore, there is no intervening veil of ideas, no mask of meanings, to potentially cut
us off from what lies outside our minds.4 That’s right of course and no doubt they have
been encouraged to do so by Russell’s later elaborations upon the New Philosophy,
(e.g.) his often quoted reflection from ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge
by Description’ that judgements cannot consist of ideas because ‘in this view ideas
become a veil between us and outside things—we never really, in knowledge, attain to
the things we are supposed to be knowing about, but only to the ideas of those things’.5
But depicted this way we lose sight of the truly radical character of Moore’s vision.
As Moore was to reflect in his ‘Refutation of Idealism’, there is not, from the point of
view of the New Philosophy, even a question of our having to get outside the circle
of our ideas and sensations. Why? Because our ideas and sensations, appearances, are
themselves solid and real enough that cognition of them constitutes cognition of an
objective realm.
Moore sought to refute idealism by appealing to his favoured act/object analysis of
conscious states—an analysis that distinguishes the act of conscious awareness from
the thing of which we are aware. Because this analysis places the things of which we are
aware at the tail end of an asymmetric relation (‘awareness’) from us, Moore concluded
that these things aren’t of our making. The strategy of turning the act/object analysis to
4
See Linsky 1988: 627 and Hylton 1990: 135. 5
See Russell 1910–11: 119.
anti-idealist ends had already occurred to Moore when he wrote the first chapter of his
1898 dissertation, ‘In the relation of subject and object, the object always appears to
me as something merely “presented”, merely there, not as something produced by the
subject’ (1898: 155).
Of course idealists can avoid Moore’s conclusion if they can adopt an alternative
analysis of conscious states that’s viable. But Moore dismissed what he considered to be
the only two alternatives to his favoured act/object analysis—that either (a) our con-
sciousness is identical to the thing of which we are conscious or (b) that the thing of
which we are conscious is a predicate, that is, a property, of the conscious act itself. Now
our sensations of colours, for example, are alike in some respects, because they involve
consciousness, but differ in other respects, because the colours of which we are conscious
vary. Moore accordingly conceived of such sensations as complex states consisting
of consciousness plus a colour. The sensation of blue and the sensation of green are
sensations because they both involve consciousness; but they are different sensations
because their constituent colours are different. But obviously this account of the
sameness and difference of sensory states founders if the things of which we are aware
are identical to consciousness itself. Because then we will have to identify each colour
of which we’re conscious with consciousness itself and then we will have no basis for
distinguishing between sensations of different colours.
Why don’t philosophers notice straightaway that the things of which we are aware
and our awareness of them are different? Moore offered an error theory to explain
their oversight. He claimed that consciousness has a peculiar phenomenological
quality, diaphaneity, which makes it extremely difficult to fix our attention upon it.
So we’re liable to overlook that consciousness is even part of the set-up: ‘the moment
we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems
to vanish: it seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect
the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were
diaphanous’ (1903: 450).
What about the other suggestion Moore had available, that the things of which we
are conscious are properties of conscious episodes themselves? According to Moore
what constitutes the intentionality of the mental is the fact that our conscious states
enter into relations with things outside of them. The fact that our sensations may have
this or that property is irrelevant to whether it is this thing or that thing of which we
are conscious: ‘It is possible, I admit, that my awareness is blue as well as being of blue:
but what I am quite sure of is that it is of blue; that it has to blue that simple and unique
relation the existence of which alone justifies us in distinguishing knowledge of a thing
from the thing known, and indeed in distinguishing mind from matter’ (1903: 450).
Historically Moore’s argument provided an important motive force for the recognition
of alternative logical forms for sensory states that Moore’s arguments don’t rule out—
to provide alternative ways of thinking about sensory states that don’t involve identity
or predication of properties. Witness Ducasse’s famous rejoinder to Moore that the
argument of ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ overlooks the possibility of an adverbial
analysis of sensory states.6 But the effectiveness, or otherwise, of Moore’s arguments

for his favoured act/object analysis of sensory states isn’t to the point right now. What
we want to achieve is an understanding of Moore’s outlook and intellectual development
so that we can comprehend the ontology of his early scheme.
We don’t have an entire copy of Moore’s second dissertation. From Moore’s own
surviving manuscript, the bulk of the chapter on ‘Reason’ is missing—probably it was
taken out by Moore when he decided to work it up for publication as his subsequent
position paper, ‘The Nature of Judgment’. But there is a surviving fragment that was left
behind from the very opening of the chapter. It includes a statement of what Moore
intended to establish in this chapter: ‘Our object will be to show that, whatever name be
given to it, that which we call a proposition is something independent of consciousness,
and something of fundamental importance for philosophy’ (1898: 161–2). The recog-
nition of the mind-independent status of propositions was to be an important theme
of the New Philosophy as Moore guided its embryonic development. And, indeed,
when Russell later acknowledged his debt to Moore upon questions of fundamental
philosophy in The Principles of Mathematics, Russell included Moore’s discovery that
propositions have an existence independent ‘of any knowing mind’ (Russell 1903a: xxiii).
But, we can now see, the nature of the proposition certainly wasn’t the central concern
for Moore when he rejected idealism. We’ll get both the history and the philosophy
wrong if we overestimate the significance of these remarks.7
The arguments that Moore worked up from his dissertation and presented in ‘Kant’s
Idealism’ and ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ don’t presuppose any particular stance upon
the nature of propositions—not even that there are such things to be found in the
Universe. And these are arguments that Moore drew up before he spelt out his account
of propositions in the missing second chapter, arguments which endured as part of
Moore’s anti-idealist repertoire after he had had abandoned propositions altogether.
The arguments of ‘Kant’s idealism’ don’t presuppose realism about propositions but
only (a) realism in the sense of distinguishing between what we think and what is true
and (b) recognition of the fact that a necessary truth cannot depend upon a contingent
one. The arguments of ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ aren’t directed either towards
establishing that propositions, realistically conceived, are the objects of cognition.
They don’t deal with propositional attitudes but only with (c) our conscious awareness
of things. It is these arguments that put the New Philosophy into the limelight; but they
only go out of focus if we try and interpret them as arguments about propositions.
No doubt this is part of the explanation why the New Philosophy that Moore and
Russell inaugurated survived their abandoning propositions a few years down the line,
whilst they suffered no corresponding crisis of confidence in realism about reality
at large. Even after abandoning propositions, Moore and Russell still presented and
endorsed these same anti-idealist arguments in Some Main Problems of Philosophy
6
See Ducasse 1942. 7 Contra Baldwin 1990: 43.
and Problems of Philosophy.8 What’s the charitable interpretation of the sequence of stages
through which the New Philosophy evolved? That because Moore and Russell under-
stood their own arguments, that is, understood that their revolt against idealism didn’t
essentially rely upon realism about propositions, the intellectual space was opened up
for them to let propositions go. Nonetheless, Moore did accord propositions a vital
role in ‘The Nature of Judgment’, inter alia explaining how experiential uptake from
the environment and inference is possible. But assigning propositions a vital role
isn’t to adopt a propositions-first position. Even in ‘The Nature of Judgment’ Moore
never really aligned himself with the kinds of view we now associate with Frege
and Wittgenstein, that is, never took propositions to be primary but conceived of
propositions as built up from constituents whose natures are fixed prior to their
performing a role in propositions. If anything, Moore belonged to the tradition of
Hume and Mill, adhering to a Building-Block view of propositions.
3. Concepts: Simple and Complex

No doubt but that ‘The Nature of Judgment’ is an extraordinary, perhaps even a great
anti-idealist/pro-realist tract. The paper opens with Moore deconstructing what he
takes to be Bradley’s theory of judgement. Moore attributed to Bradley the view that to
judge that such-and-such, the content of what we judge must have been ‘cut off and
fixed by the mind’ by some prior judgement, a prior act of discursive abstraction (1899:
177). But since the content of this prior judgement must have already been cut off and
fixed in some judgement prior to the prior one, it’s unclear how we can ever start judg-
ing in the first place. For Moore this is symptomatic of the fact that we cannot avoid
presupposing content when we judge. Moore concluded that we must take the notion
of content as primitive, on pain of regress. Commentators have questioned whether
Moore misrepresents Bradley’s theory of judgement here—for my own part, I am
doubtful whether Bradley really had a full-blown theory of judgement that offers
anything close to an account of the nature of content. But this doesn’t make Moore’s
reflections upon what he took to be Bradley’s theory any less relevant to the important
question for us right now. How did the Zeitgeist channel its energies through Moore at
this point in history? This is a question that’s best approached in terms of Moore’s
engagement with Kant.
Kantian idealism denies us the privilege of approaching the world unadorned by
our embellishments upon it. For Kant in particular, the world-in-itself is an inscrutable
‘something’ hidden behind our representations that we can’t get out from behind to
touch because there’s no separating what’s experientially given to us from our conceptual
gilding of it. What Moore wanted to put in the place of these Kantian doctrines was an
account of how thinking subjects are situated in the world that maximizes, rather than
minimizes, our exposure to what’s really out there. Moore designed his New Philosophy
8
See, e.g., Moore 1910: 153–4 and Russell 1912: 22, 49.
to fit this brief, a realist philosophy according to which our minds engage directly with
what exists independently of us, where there is no risk of our contaminating what we
cognize with our own subjective traits.
It is possible for our minds to reach right out and touch the world-in-itself because
the basic ingredients in judgement and perceptual experience, which Moore called
‘concepts’, are the pre-given mind-independent elements that constitute reality itself. It
is for this reason that Moore regarded ‘the world as formed of concepts’ (1899: 182)
and conceived of concepts as being such that ‘it is indifferent to their nature whether
anybody thinks them or not . . . the relation in which they enter with the knowing sub-
ject implies no action or reaction’ (1899: 179). To ensure their independence from any
mind that grasps them, Moore adopted a belt-and-braces approach: he characterized
concepts as themselves ‘incapable of change’.
The concepts Moore admitted included not only simple concepts but also complex
concepts built up from simpler ones. He offered red and two as examples of simple con-
cepts that cannot be further defined and chimera as an example of a complex concept
built up from the relatively simpler concepts of lion, goat, and snake (1899: 181; 1903: 7).
When Moore revisited the issue in Principia Ethica he found it obvious that the
analysis of complexes must terminate in simples: ‘That there must be an indefinite
number of such terms is obvious on reflection; since we cannot define anything except
by an analysis, which, when carried as far as it will go, refers us to something which is
simply different from anything else, and which by that ultimate difference explains
the peculiarity of the whole which we are defining’ (1903: 10). In Principia Moore
famously offered good as a paradigm of a simple and indefinable concept; and he was
to remain committed to simples thereafter.9
By contrast to Moore, Russell did not incorporate a commitment to simples into the
version of the New Philosophy he advanced in the Principles of Mathematics—nor,
indeed, into his version of logical atomism that developed out of it.10 So far as Russell
was concerned, ‘There may be no simple constituents at all; or, to take a slightly more
complicated case, it may happen that, although there are some simple constituents, yet
these and the unities composed of them do not constitute all the constituents’
(1903: §141). But Moore could not have consistently held such a view back in 1898
dissertation when, still swayed by the influence of Kant’s Antinomies, he was dubious
of the infinite (1898: 152). This precluded Moore from then admitting the possibility of
infinitely descending analytic chains that don’t bottom out. By the time he prepared
‘The Nature of Judgment’ for publication, Moore had clearly begun to embrace the
9
See, e.g., Moore’s entry in his Notebook V from 1942–3 (1962: 207).
10
As Russell espoused his version of logical atomism in Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, ‘It is
not clear that there must be terms which are incapable of definition: it is possible that, however far back we
go in defining, we always might go further . . . since human powers are finite the definitions known to us
must always begin somewhere, with terms undefined for the moment, though perhaps not permanently’
(1919: 4). See also Russell 1918–19: 202, 1921: 124 and 1959: 123–4. Russell did briefly conjure with the
doctrine that there are absolute rather than relative atoms in ‘Analytic Realism’ (1911a: 135) but he
subsequently changed his mind back.
intelligibility of the infinite, because he there acknowledges that there are infinitely
many logical relations that hold among propositions. But Moore still showed no signs
of admitting infinitely complex concepts, suggesting at one point that the difference
between a concept and a proposition ‘would seem to lie merely in the simplicity of the
former’ (1899: 180). It’s the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus we remember for saying that
analyses must terminate in simples.11 But it was certainly Moore who brought the
idea to the Cambridge table.
Moore fancied propositions, whether true or false, as built up from concepts:
‘A proposition is composed not of words, nor yet of thoughts, but of concepts . . . A
proposition is constituted by any number of concepts, together with a specific relation
between them; and according to the nature of this relation the proposition may be either
true or false’ (1899: 180). And like its constituent concepts, a proposition is similarly
incapable of change, ‘A proposition is a synthesis of concepts; and, just as concepts are
themselves immutably what they are’ (1899: 180). It’s the early Russell we remember for
the idea that that the things we think about are the component parts of the propositions
we affirm; hence the currency of the phrase ‘Russellian propositions’.12 Yet this was only
another view that Russell took over from Moore—the view that there is no intervening
veil of words or ideas, no mask of meanings or Fregean senses to cut us off from the
things (or concepts) outside our minds upon whose states (or configurations) depends
the truth or falsity of the propositions we judge to be the case. But Moore still thought
of a proposition as ‘less ultimate . . . than the nature of its constituents’ (1899: 193). For
Moore the world was ultimately the totality of concepts, not propositions. Because
Moore thought of concepts as more ultimate than the propositions they constituted, he
cannot be aligned with the Kant–Frege–Wittgenstein axis that puts propositions first.
4. The Normative Significance of Propositions

and Other Complex Concepts
Moore was committed to simple or atomic concepts but we miss something out if
we think of him merely as a latter-day Democritus. Moore was also committed to
the existence of propositions and other complexes built up from atomic concepts
and Moore’s reasons for incurring this commitment are surprising—not the kinds of
reasons that come initially to mind which some commentators attribute to the early
Moore. Moore wanted to secure for realism the result that our judgements are true (or
false) regardless of our mental states, except, of course, where they are judgements
about our own inner goings-on: so if a judgement is true (or false), is it true (or false)
absolutely and objectively. Appeal to a realm of mind-independent propositions
provides one means of reassuring ourselves about the objectivity of the judgements we
11
See Wittgenstein 1922: 2.02–2.0201.
12
See Russell to Frege, 12 December 1904 (Frege 1980a: 169).
make because it forestalls the suspicion that the mind-dependence of the truth-bearers
will compromise the mind-independence of the truth-values they bear.13 The problem
with this, admittedly intuitive, line of thought is not just that Russell strenuously
resisted it later, establishing that there is no immediate linkage between the mind-
dependence of propositions and the mind-dependence of truth—because whether
or not a mind-dependent truth-bearer is true (or false) may still depend upon mind-
independent factors outside of it.14 The real problem for us right now is that this kind of
preoccupation with objectivity doesn’t help us to understand what the real reason was,
the distinctive animus behind Moore’s commitment to propositions.
On 11 September 1898 Moore wrote to Russell shortly after submitting his second
dissertation. He told Russell about the improvements he had made since they had last
met together in June. Moore reported: ‘Almost all the addition to my dissertation was
metaphysical . . . My chief discovery, which shocked me a great deal when I made it, is
expressed in the form that an existent is a proposition.’15 What compelled Moore to
make such an apparently nonsensical sounding claim, to identify an existent thing
with a proposition? The fact, according to Moore, that ‘This explains how it should
commonly be thought that a proposition can be inferred from an existent’. What
Moore meant by this may not be obvious straightaway and Moore mentioned nothing
else as guiding him to this, his chief discovery. But it tells us enough to appreciate that
Moore wasn’t driven to affirm the mind-independence of propositions because the
need to ensure the mind-independence of their truth-values was at the forefront of his
mind. What was at the forefront of his mind was something else: the need to make sense
of the fact that we infer propositions to be true or false on the basis of our experience
of existing things.
We can get a pretty good idea of how Moore arrived at this concern if we back up and
approach Moore’s discovery in the light of one of the criticisms he had made of Kant in
the first chapter of his 1898 dissertation. There Moore had complained that Kant’s
notion of a condition of empirical knowledge was ambiguous between a causal and a
logical reading, that is, between ‘only a causal explanation’ of our knowledge of truths
and a justification of ‘why they are true’ (1898: 150). When Moore came to sketch his
own world-picture as an alternative to Kant’s, he wanted to provide an account of our
commerce with the world that offered the fullest respect to this distinction: Moore
wanted to provide an account of our empirical uptake of truths that explained how
it was possible for our knowledge states to be rationally justified rather than mere
psychological occurrences at the end of a causal chain.
13
According to Hylton this concern with objectivity explains why ‘Russell and Moore should have taken
the issue of the nature of judgment as a central metaphysical problem’ (Hylton 1984: 379–80). But, as I will
argue, Moore’s concern with propositions did not arise from a direct concern with objectivity, but rather
with understanding how it is possible for our experiential uptake to provide information about the world.
14
See Russell 1910a: 149–50 and 1912: 69–75.
15
This letter is held in the Russell Archive at McMaster University. Moore offered a similar emphasis
when he wrote to McCarthy on 14 August 1898: ‘An existent is nothing but a proposition’.
We can reconstruct Moore’s creative thought processes as running along the

following lines. Moore didn’t only want to think of us as having direct awareness of
things-in-themselves, that is, concepts. He also wanted to conceive of what awareness
directly delivers to us as inherently intelligible. It is because what is thereby given is
intelligible-in-itself that Moore supposed reality to be capable of exerting a normative
force over what we think about it—for reality to make it appropriate (justified) for us
to think one way rather than another about it. Moore assigned this role of exerting
normative force over us to propositions and other complex concepts conceived as
full-fledged elements of reality itself. Syntheses of concepts are capable of exerting
such a force over us because they are complex. It is by appreciating the contours of their
complexity that propositions, concepts more generally, bear a rational (non-causal)
influence over what we think about them, over discursive thought.
Against this backdrop we can see the sense in Moore’s identification of ordinary
existing things, the things we see, with true existential propositions. For Moore to say
that ‘an existent is seen to be nothing but a concept or complex of concepts standing
in a unique relation to the concept of existence’ where the relation in question relates
the other concepts of the proposition to confer truth upon the whole (1899: 180, 183). The
identification of an ordinary thing with an existential proposition ensures the possibility
of our securing discursive insight into its nature, ‘A thing becomes intelligible first
when it is analysed into its constituent concepts’ (1899: 182). And identifying a thing
with an existential proposition explains the possibility of our drawing inferences from
our perceptual experience of it, as Moore told Russell in his letter.
We can get a feel for the kinds of pressures that directed Moore down this route of
reflections if we consider what it would mean if it is only sensations that are given to us
in perceptual experience. Then it is problematic how our experiential uptake could
provide a justification, or a reason, for the beliefs we hold about things outside of us. It’s
problematic because we cannot infer what we should believe from the sensations that
occur within our conscious ambit. Our inability to infer what we should believe from
our sensations does not arise from the fact that sensations are remote from the things
that cause them—the problem is not the routine one of under-determination. Rather
it’s because inference is a relation that only holds between packages of information that
are truth-apt and sensations just are not shaped that way. This was a problem that was
to beset the logical positivists’ efforts to provide a foundation for empirical knowledge
and was to lead Davidson to the discomfiting dictum that ‘nothing can count as a reason
for holding a belief except a belief ’ because beliefs are the only kind of truth-apt vehicle
available to stand in inferential relations to our beliefs about the world. But this is a
saying which if correct threatens to cut us off from the world outside of us.16 It’s a
measure of the extent of Moore’s acumen that before any of them Moore saw his way
out of this uncomfortable space of alternatives and forestalled the need for anxiety,
16
See Neurath 1932/3 and Davidson 1986: 310.
at least on this score, about the relationship between our perceptual experience and
the beliefs we form upon that basis.
Moore did so by conceiving of perception as awareness of something that is capable
of being true or false, unlike a sensation, but which is not just another inner state, like a
belief. We can infer what the world is like from our perceptual experience, because, for
Moore, perception is awareness of worldly things whose raison d’être is to be capable
of being true or false and therefore fit to be the subjects of inference. This is their
raison d’être because the things we perceive are themselves propositions, existential
propositions placed outside of us. As Moore expressed the point himself, ‘It now appears
that perception is to be regarded philosophically as the cognition of an existential
proposition; and it is thus apparent how it can furnish a basis for an inference, which
uniformly exhibits the connexion between propositions’ (1899: 183).
Of course this is a way of thinking about the connections amongst perception,
thought and reality bears more than a family resemblance to the world-picture that
McDowell has more recently sketched—one according to which there is no ‘ontological
gap’ between the sort of thing one can perceive or think and the sort of thing that can
be the case.17 But Moore had already thought ahead, understood what McDowell has
more recently recovered.
Moore similarly forestalled anxiety about the objectivity of logic by affirming not
only the mind-independent reality of propositions but also the inferential liaisons that
hold between them—long before he, or even Russell, had read Frege. It would be
unsatisfactory in the extreme, Moore recognized, to maintain that a ‘conclusion was
only connected with premises in my thoughts, and that an inference was nothing,
if nobody was making it’. To avoid the pitfalls of psychologism about logic, Moore
recognized that ‘the relation of premises to conclusion is objective’ (1899: 183). They
hold amongst immutable propositions, ‘so they stand in infinite relations to one another
equally immutably’ (1899: 180). Logic is out there, a feature of the world-in-itself.
In light of the immutability Moore attributed to concepts and propositions, how was
it possible for Moore to accommodate the fact that the world we inhabit is one of
becoming? Moore does not address the issue directly in ‘The Nature of Judgment’ but
we know enough about the New Philosophy to envisage how he might have done. Moore
conceived of spaces and times as concepts too, ipso facto constituents of propositions.
This conception of spaces and times is incorporated into the account of change that
Russell recommended in The Principles of Mathematics: ‘Change is the difference in
respect of truth or falsehood, between a proposition concerning an entity and a time T
and a proposition concerning the same entity and another time T ’, provided that the
two propositions differ only by the fact that T ’ occurs in the one where T ’ occurs in
the other’.18 The concept red can change in this sense because the proposition may be
17
See McDowell 1994: 24–7.
18
See Russell 1903a: §442. Moore offers essentially the same view of change in one of his Baldwin
dictionary entries, these being the first pieces of philosophical writing that Moore undertook as a Prize
Fellow (Moore 1942a: 23). The entry on change differs primarily from Russell’s in that propositions are no
immutably true that red exists now—the concepts red, existence, and now may be truly
related—whilst another proposition that red exists at some other time T may be no
less immutably false—so that the concepts of red, existence, and T are falsely related
(1899: 190). Understood in the terms of the New Philosophy, the possibility of change
(amongst ordinary things) is nowise compromised by the immutability of concepts
or propositions.
Moore was indeed able to accommodate the fact that we inhabit a world of becoming
but he wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote to McCarthy describing his New Philosophy
as ‘the most Platonic system of modern times’.19 When Moore used this phrase to
describe the New Philosophy he was registering his commitment to a realm of pure
being in addition to one of becoming. For this reason, Moore continued his letter,
‘I cannot justify the importance we attribute to existence’. Moore didn’t mean anything
exotic or outlandish by this claim—or anything deeper than it should be. Moore was
registering his resistance to the species of naturalism that only admits things that have
a toehold somewhere in space or time. Moore was impressed by the fact that neither
Logic nor Arithmetic have spatial or temporal things as their subject matters; they are
‘independent of space and time’ (1898a: 175). According to Moore, ‘We should have to
stretch our notion of existence, beyond intelligibility, to suppose that 2 ever has been,
is, or will be an existent’ (1899: 180; 1903a: 111). What he meant by this was that it is
unintelligible to suppose that 2 exists by virtue of being located somewhere in space
or time. But whilst 2 does not exist, in that restricted sense, 2 still has being, in an
‘absolutely universal’ sense (1899: 188). Moore accordingly admitted a realm of pure
being, a place for numbers, values, and other unnatural things to safely dwell that
cannot be comfortably housed in space and time. We can picture Moore’s Universe as
consisting of two concentric spheres: an outer sphere of concepts and propositions
that aren’t embroiled in the inner sphere of existential propositions (things) whose
constituents include spaces, times, and the concept of existence.
This may initially sound very odd to our ears but a number of factors need to be
taken into account if we’re to understand Moore. We need to remember that both Moore’s
notion of a proposition and his notion of a thing aren’t standard for us. For Moore, an
existential proposition is a denizen of the world, not of Frege’s third realm. And a
Moorean thing is a bundle of concepts united with existence, that is, united as a true
existential proposition. Perhaps we still find it difficult to accept that an ordinary
thing is a Moorean thing. But by Moore’s lights this is because the subject–predicate
structure of ordinary discourse misleads us into thinking that ordinary things are the
subjects of the propositions we express. But, as will become clear in the next chapter,
Moore held that in this respect we are misled by ordinary discourse. In inviting us to
longer given the metaphysical focus they received in ‘The Nature of Judgment’. In this entry Moore described
change as the transition ‘from the existence of something in time to the existence of something else in time,
different from the first in some other respect than mere position in time’ (Moore 1901–02b: 172).
19
The letter is held in the Moore archive in Cambridge University Library.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or
determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic

works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project

Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back

On The Genealogy of Universals The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy First Edition Edition Fraser Macbride Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

On The Genealogy of Universals The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy First Edition Edition Fraser Macbride Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

On The Genealogy Of Universals: The

Metaphysical Origins Of Analytic

On the Genealogy of Universals

See Dummett 1994: 26 and Burge 2005: 1.

scepticism about the particular–universal distinction.

an unprecedented fashion, explaining ‘Universals’ as the closing stage of a conversation

See his sister, Margaret Paul’s memoir of Ramsey (Paul 2012).

outlook on the categories from a contemporary perspective.

Ramsey’s arguments creates an epistemic context in which we cannot continue to

Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 9

2. Synthetic A Priori Principles in Geometry,

10 Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’

Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 11

12 Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’

is an analytic truth that a substance is an ultimate subject, whereas an attribute is a

Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 13

3. The Copernican Revolution

14 Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’

4. The Forms of Judgement and the Categories

Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 15

‘the pure concepts of the understanding’, or ‘the categories’, to what is given to us to

16 Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’

a­ nalytic philosophy might be described as an unfolding realization that the task

Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 17

5. How the Metaphysical Deduction Fell Short

18 Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’

Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 19

20 Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’

Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 21

of judgement has to be that it is empty. The bare description of judgement as the

22 Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’

s­ uccession of relatively enduring things, so long as there is sufficient overlap amongst

Kantian Prequel: ‘Idols of the Tribe’ 23

Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’ 25

2. The Revolt against Idealism

26 Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’

Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’ 27

28 Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’

Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’ 29

analysis of sensory states.6 But the effectiveness, or otherwise, of Moore’s arguments

30 Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’

3. Concepts: Simple and Complex

Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’ 31

32 Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’

4. The Normative Significance of Propositions

Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’ 33

34 Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’

We can reconstruct Moore’s creative thought processes as running along the

Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’ 35

36 Early Moore: ‘The Most Platonic System of Modern Times’

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

You might also like

a nalytic philosophy might be described as an unfolding realization that the task

s uccession of relatively enduring things, so long as there is sufficient overlap amongst