The Ordinary Language Reaction against Logical Formalism
The ordinary language school became popular as a reaction against the logical
formalists. In this respect it too was part of the realignment of positions; locally
in England, the scene was the collapse of interest in Idealism, and new positions
expanded to fill the vacant attention space. Originally, Russell’s mathematical
logicism was only a technical specialty on the periphery of British philosophy.
The development of Idealist systems remained a primary interest down to the
1920s. Bradley (whose Appearance and Reality appeared in 1893) was reputed
the greatest living philosopher. At Cambridge the leader was McTaggart, who
produced amplifications of Hegel in 1896, 1901, and 1910, down through his
great posthumous system (1927), and along with two other Idealists, Ward
and Stout, dominated teaching for the philosophy honors examinations.
The opposition consisted in various versions of naturalism. Outside the
academic world, Spencer went on enlarging his evolutionist system down
through 1899 and sold widely for another decade; inside the universities,
experimental psychology was becoming a battleground between naturalistic
and spiritualistic approaches. Utilitarianism continued, most famously at the
hands of Sidgwick at Cambridge, until his death in 1900. But now there was
considerable crossing over among the schools, a sign of the realignment to
come. Sidgwick had founded the Society for Psychic Research; among its
members was Arthur Balfour, another Trinity student and Sidgwick’s brother-
in-law. Balfour adopted Humean skepticism to undermine anti-religious ration-
alism, and held (1895) that all beliefs including those regarding nature rest on
a climate of traditional opinion. The Utilitarians, once considered outrageous
political radicals, had given ground intellectually while gaining connections of
high social respectability; Balfour was conservative leader of the House of
Commons in the 1890s and prime minister 1902–1906. On the whole, prestige
was on the side of Idealism as the sophisticated and up-to-date accommodation
with religion.
The first major break in this structure of the attention space came in 1903
with G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. Moore simultaneously criticized all the
prominent schools, at least within the restricted grounds of ethical theory.
Spencer’s evolutionist ethics and the Utilitarianism of Bentham, Mill, and
Sidgwick, all fall afoul of the naturalistic fallacy; Idealist systems, too, commit
a version of the fallacy by identifying the good with an aspect of super-sensible
reality. The good is an indefinable predicate because it is absolutely simple;
here Moore approaches the position taken by Russell in his logic built up from
ultimate simples, in opposition to the holistic logic of Idealism.^29 Moore further
criticizes all other ethical systems by the argument that good cannot be iden-
tified with any one object, such as pleasure or (on the Idealist side) moral duty;
The Post-revolutionary Condition^ •^731