Some Main Problems of Philosophy (Muirhead Library of Philosophy)

8vo (22 cm), XIII, 380, [2] pp. Publisher's cloth, gilt-lettered spine, top edge painted red (binding slightly rubbed). Published as part of the Muirhead Library of Philosophy edited by H. D. Lewis. The book consists of twenty lectures delivered at Morley College in London in the winter of 1910-11, published much later at the urging of John Wisdom, who wrote the foreword praising Moore's characteristic directness, honesty, and incisiveness--qualities he saw as continuous with the spirit of Moore's Principia Ethica and Philosophical Studies. Moore's own preface acknowledges the book's datedness while defending its enduring relevance, noting he made verbal changes throughout but more substantial omissions in the final two chapters, adding an appendix to address what he considered their chief defects. Its twenty chapters cover what is philosophy, sense-data, ways of knowing, propositions, Hume's theory and material things, existence in space and time, the notion of infinity, the meaning of "real," imagination and memory, beliefs and propositions, true and false beliefs, being, fact and existence, truths and universals, relations and properties, resemblance, and finally disjunctive and other properties and abstractions--representing Moore's foundational contribution to analytic philosophy's engagement with the problems of perception, universals, and the external world.…