G.E. Moore didn't disappear from history. His Ethics (1907) and Principia Ethica (1903) both remain widely cited. His naturalistic fallacy remains a major tour de force in ethics[1], and his moral "super-objectivism" was studied and critiqued throughout the 1900s by every heavy hitter out there: from Geach, to Anscombe, to Foot, to Lawrence.
> ... but through the second half of the 20th century interest went into serious decline
I wish Monk were more clear here. Basically all of non-natural moral theory (virtue ethics, objectivism, Kantian ethics, divine law in theological circles) went into a nosedive. Seriously, read Ansombe's MMP[2] and you'll see how disillusioned she was with the state of moral philosophy -- which was, at the time, mostly interested in linguistic and logical puzzles: is "good" descriptive, predicative, commendatory, attributive, or what-have-you.
"G.E. Moore didn't disappear from history. His Ethics (1907) and Principia Ethica (1903) both remain widely cited."
Correct, G.E. Moore certainly didn't disappear from history. I still have my copy of Principia Ethica that was drummed into me in Phil. classes at university decades ago.
I've kept a copy of this and other works such as Plato's Republic along with the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau and others that are so well know to the cognoscenti that I needn't even name them—both because they are great and important works that have stood the test of time and that I still occasionally refer to them.
Given the many difficult moral and ethical dilemmas now facing the world, it seems to me it's more important than ever that we should reacquaint ourselves with Moore's works on ethics.
Incidentally, I've just looked up notes on my laptop about a matter wherein I've included a reference from Moore's Principia Ethica, that was on 2019-10-27. QED!
I know this is written by Ray Monk, but I don't think GE Moore has been forgotten. Not by me, anyway.
No, he isn't one of the Big Names of Philosophy, but then, not many philosophers are.
When I studied undergraduate philosophy early this century, his work and arguments arose numerous times. And the strength of his philosophical personality in his writings certainly left an impression on me.
I'm intrigued by McTaggart's theory that time is unreal. However, try as I may, I cannot understand A-series and B-series.
I think that time does not exist, it is merely an abstraction that measures the relative rate of movement of matter. Everything we use to "measure" time is based on the physical movement of matter: pendulum, hourglass, rotation of Earth, watch balance wheel, even electronic crystal vibrations.
When we say that something took an hour, we mean that it elapsed while the Earth spun 15 degrees. Or traveled 0.041 degrees around the sun. The passage of time is simply the collective movement of all the matter in the Universe. We cannot travel back in time because entropy has scattered everything.
The past is how matter was arranged before. The future is how it will be after.
Surely that's just redefining what time means. And the definition seems tautological to me; when you say "movement of matter", that implies a time dimension, since you cannot have movement without time. And the phrase "rate of movement" uses a word (rate) that is inherently about time (meters per second, for example).
I came to this hypothesis on my own. I think it's a very good idea. You can think about existence in a very interesting manner once you embrace and understanding of time being emergent.
Philosophical popularity waxes and wanes. At the level Monk describes, the brilliant Frank Ramsey -- with notable philosophical contributions in truth theory and probability, as well as in economic theory and mathematics -- seems similarly missing, though he died at a mere 26. Anyway, as Russell once wrote: "... since one never knows what will be the line of advance, it is always most rash to condemn what is not quite in the fashion of the moment" (from his review of MacColl’s Symbolic Logic and Its Applications in Mind, 15, 1906], p. 260).
> ... but through the second half of the 20th century interest went into serious decline
I wish Monk were more clear here. Basically all of non-natural moral theory (virtue ethics, objectivism, Kantian ethics, divine law in theological circles) went into a nosedive. Seriously, read Ansombe's MMP[2] and you'll see how disillusioned she was with the state of moral philosophy -- which was, at the time, mostly interested in linguistic and logical puzzles: is "good" descriptive, predicative, commendatory, attributive, or what-have-you.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/
[2] https://www.pitt.edu/~mthompso/readings/mmp.pdf