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Introduction To G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica, G. Scott Davis

Religious Studies Faculty Publications

When Principia Ethica appeared, in 1903, it became something of a sacred text for the Cambridge-educated elites-Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes-who, along with Virginia Woolf, would form the core of the Bloomsbury Group. In a letter of October 11, 1903, Strachey confesses to Moore that he is "carried away" by Principia, which inaugurates, for him, "the beginning of the Age of Reason." Moore's critique of convention, his caustic dismissal of his philosophical predecessors, and the relentless rigor of his method promised a revolution in morality commensurate with the modernist transformation of art and literature. Principia Ethica shifted …