1: Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore

Section 1: Early Analytic Philosophy

1: Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore

The founding of the analytic tradition in the early 20th century is largely credited to the collaborative yet distinct work of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Their initial, shared project was a decisive rebellion against the dominant philosophical system of their time: British Absolute Idealism, as represented by thinkers like F.H. Bradley. Idealism held that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual, a single, all-encompassing Absolute, and that everyday objects and the distinctions of common sense are mere appearances.

Moore led the charge with a method of defense rather than elaborate construction. His seminal 1903 paper, "The Refutation of Idealism," attacked the idealist principle that esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). Moore insisted on a robust realism, arguing that consciousness and its object are distinct. His philosophical program, often termed "common-sense realism," aimed not to prove the existence of the external world but to analyze the propositions we know to be true from ordinary life (e.g., "Here is one hand"). For Moore, the task of philosophy was the careful analysis of these common-sense beliefs to clarify their precise meaning, not to deny them.

Russell shared Moore’s realist conviction but provided the powerful technical tools that came to define analytic philosophy. Deeply influenced by developments in logic and mathematics, Russell pursued logical analysis. He sought to show that the underlying logical form of statements about the world could be different from their surface grammatical form. A famous example is his theory of definite descriptions, which analyzes a phrase like "the present King of France" without assuming such an entity must exist. This technique aimed to resolve philosophical puzzles by revealing the true, logical structure of reality.

Their approaches to perception also diverged instructively. Moore grappled with sense data—the immediate objects of sensory awareness (e.g., a patch of colour)—as the certain foundation of knowledge, while maintaining that material objects, though not directly known, are the causes of these data. Russell, at least in his early period, was more reductionist, proposing that material objects could be construed as logical constructions out of sense data. Together, Moore’s insistence on common-sense truths and Russell’s development of logical analysis established the core methodological pillars of early analytic philosophy: clarity, argumentative rigor, and the dissolution of problems through linguistic and logical scrutiny.