Common Sense

One of the philosophers in the book that I am finding myself a fan of is Geoge Moore. Mainly, I have to agree with his opinion that a lot of philosophers wind up denying things that "every sane human knew to be true." Like Zeno's paradox-of course I can make it to the door, so why debate this fact? Essentially, Moore came up with a list of "common sense" propositions that are certainly true. This list contains such mundane facts as "there exists at present a living human body, which is my body," which Moore used to illustrate that, at some point, some philosopher denied. He also chose the route of pointing out that statements made by previous philosophers are strange rather than untrue; that is, no obvious meaning can be associated with the statements. In Moore's view, not meaning exactly anything raised suspicion of meaning nothing.

Moore also disagreed with attempts to come up with new ways of communicating facts as he did not know exactly what was wrong with "ordinary language." Interestingly enough, he felt that the goal of philosophy is the clarification of meaning rather than arriving at the truth. It seems that Moore preferred to focus on using precise language so that exact meaning can be ascribed to statements and the many ambiguous statements made by previous philosophers can be avoided.

This is, to me, a refreshing and realistic approach to philosophy. Why make a statement if nobody can even determine exactly what is meant? Why deny something that can trivially be proven to be true? In fact, as an extreme example, the section on Descartes points out that "radical doubt, in telling us that we should never trust the senses, has suddenly become a form of insanity."