Abstract

Together with the new translation of the Principia with the 1922 Preface by the editors as this collection, published in 2023 at Bompiani, this volume offers a perspective on the work of one of the 20th century leading moral philosophers. Moore, with Russell and Wittgenstein, is believed to have been one of the fathers of analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, Elizabeth Anscombe pointed to Moore in Modern Moral Philosophy as a contributor to the degeneration of English-language ethics and the 20th-century moral confusion. She indicated Wittgenstein, Aristotle and Aquinas as the source of remedies for prevailing bewilderment. The essays translated in this collection highlight lesser-known aspects of Moore’s work. For those who only know the image of Moore as a ‘professional’ philosopher, and one of the fathers of analytic philosophy, it may be interesting to see him oscillate between the opposite poles of ‘naturalism’, a nostalgia for religion or at least for a substitute to it, alternately Neo-Hegelian idealism or a faith in beauty and love. Firstly, the collection includes two unpublished manuscripts, seven never reprinted essays, three reprinted but never translated, and only two already translated into in Italian, thus giving the possibility of a stereoscopic reading of Moore’s work that would rescue it from the simplified image that Moore himself had created in the 1930s and analytic philosophers have preserved by inertia. Secondly, it includes early writings verging on ethical issues from which the framework of themes and problems from which the answer outlined in the Principia Ethica to Socrates’ question ‘how should I live’ becomes clearer. Thirdly, the collection touches on aspects for which Moore was indebted to 19th-century British debates, which he did not easily find a way out of. As Keynes said, Moore had ‘one foot in the twentieth century’ but – we would add – not one but two or three in the nineteenth. With the formulation of the argument of the naturalistic fallacy, he opened the discussion of one of the themes of analytic ethics, but with his critique of intuitionism, hedonism, evolutionism, ‘metaphysics’ and his re-proposition of the Para-Hegelian notion of ‘organic unity’ he was fully immersed in the 19th-century debates. The discussion of his theses, which was for a century a discussion of something no one had really understood, can now start anew perhaps in the right way, from an understanding of the terms in which the problems really were posed at the time which Baldwin and Regan’s historiographical contributions by have made possible (and to which Mario Micheletti could have contributed if someone had been able to read literature in Italian).