Principia Ethica (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

George Edward Moore didn’t intend to be a philosopher. He was born in 1873 to devout evangelical parents, but according to his autobiography, “long before I left school, I was, to use a word then popular, a complete Agnostic.” Moore went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1892, as a Classics scholar, but by the end of his freshman year his new friend Bertrand Russell was urging Moore to take up philosophy. Moore was elected to the secret Cambridge Conversazione Society, more commonly known as the Apostles, the elite of the intellectual community at Cambridge. In 1898 he was elected to a six-year fellowship at Trinity. In 1925 Moore was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, a position that he held until his retirement in 1939. He continued to write and lecture regularly until his death in 1958.