But his work embraced themes and concerns that reach well beyond any single philosophical programme. Moore grew up in South London his eldest brother was the poet T.
Sturge Moore who worked as an illustrator with W. In he went to Trinity College Cambridge to study Classics. He soon made the acquaintance there of Bertrand Russell who was two years ahead of him and of J.
Under their encouragement Moore decided to add the study of Philosophy to his study of Classics, and he graduated in with a First Class degree in the subject. In he was successful and over the next six years he matured as a dynamic young philosopher, actually leading Russell away from the idealist philosophy of McTaggart and others which was then dominant in Britain. Moore's Fellowship ended in ; after a spell away from Cambridge, Moore returned there in to a lectureship in the University and he then lived there for the rest of his life apart from an extended visit to the U.
In he became editor of Mind , the leading British philosophical journal, and in he became a Professor at Cambridge. These two appointments confirmed his position as the most highly respected British philosopher of the time, and with Wittgenstein back in Cambridge after , Cambridge became the most important centre of philosophy in the world.
Moore retired as Professor in to be succeeded by Wittgenstein and as editor of Mind in ; these retirements marked not only the end of his pre-eminence, but also of the golden age of Cambridge philosophy.
