Historical Perspective
Any account of Philosophy in Cambridge must emphasise the work of at least three men — Bertrand Russell, G E Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. These three transformed the discipline of philosophy during the first half of the last century and made Cambridge the most important centre for philosophy in the English-speaking world.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
Russell came to philosophy from mathematics and his early work
led him to argue in Principia Mathematica that mathematics is
nothing but logic, although his famous paradox also shows that
the connection between logic and mathematics cannot be at all
straightforward. In the course of this work Russell developed
a new logical theory, and he used this theory to recommend to
philosophers a new method of 'logical analysis' whereby, he hoped,
it would be possible to resolve many of the traditional problems
of philosophy. His thought was that in a 'logically perfect language'
a language whose logical structure was transparent
it would be possible to transform the obscure tangles of traditional
metaphysics into solvable scientific problems.
G.E. Moore (1873–1958)
In his famous book Principia Ethica , Moore argued that because
ethical disputes cannot be resolved by appeal to the natural and
social sciences, we should acknowledge that ethical values constitute
an irreducible dimension of reality. Moore further held that friendship
and beauty are pre-eminent among these values, and thus that the
best of lives is a life successfully dedicated to their enhancement.
This message was taken to heart by Moore's friends among the Cambridge
'Apostles', such as Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, and John Maynard
Keynes, and became characteristic of the 'Bloomsbury Group'. In
later years Moore, who became Professor of Philosophy in 1925,
turned his attention to the traditional issues of metaphysics
and propounded a defence of 'common sense' against a variety of
sceptical arguments.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
Wittgenstein came to Cambridge from Vienna in 1911 to study
with Russell. In his first great work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
he developed Russell's account of the role of logic and presented
an account of the limits of language which implies that problems
of philosophy are either such that they can be solved by logical
analysis or else such that nothing can be said about them. Having,
as he thought, finished philosophy, Wittgenstein left Cambridge;
but he returned in 1929 and throughout the 1930s conducted his
famous classes. He brought together many of his reflections from
these classes in his Philosophical Investigations, in which he
pursued much further the questions about the limits of language
that he had earlier raised, particularly in connection with questions
concerning our understanding of ourselves.
The Cambridge School and the Past
Several other important philosophers worked in Cambridge during the first half of the last century, including J E M McTaggart, C D Broad, Frank Ramsey, R B Braithwaite, and John Wisdom.
This Cambridge School did not arise ex nihilo: Moore's ethical theory draws heavily on Henry Sidgwick's classic examination of utilitarianism, The Methods of Ethics (1874); and important contributions to logic had been made at the end of the nineteenth century by J N Keynes and J Venn (famous for his diagrams).
In the seventeenth century, Christ's College was home for the 'Cambridge Platonists' Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, who revived Platonist doctrines of innate ideas in order to counter Hobbes' materialism and Descartes' dualism. But many Cambridge philosophers might prefer to look back to the author of the Novum Organon, Francis Bacon (who studied at Trinity College from 1573 until 1575), as the founder of their tradition.
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