SOURCE: "Liberator, Up to a Point," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 34, March 26, 1987, pp. 37-9.

In the following review of Tom Regan's Bloomsbury Prophet: G. E. Moore and the Development of His Moral Philosophy and a collection of Moore's early essays, Hampshire agrees with Regan's assessment that Moore's methodology was Platonic.

G. E. Moore was a dominant figure in British philosophy from 1903 until his death at eighty-five in 1958. In 1958 many British philosophers would have named Russell, Wittgenstein, and Moore as the three great Englishspeaking philosophers of the twentieth century. During the last twenty-five years Moore has slowly ceased to be at the center of interest in the way Russell and Wittgenstein are, except for the early chapters of his still famous book on moral philosophy, Principia Ethica, first published in 1903.

Tom Regan, a professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University, argues that the true significance...