The last entry recorded G. E. Moore’s reaction to a paper given by Susan Stebbing. She alludes to it here, twenty-five years later, in her contribution to the volume of The Library of Living Philosophers devoted to Moore’s philosophy.
Susan Stebbing ‘I never had the good fortune to be technically a student of Moore's, since I left Cambridge just before he returned to it as a lecturer. Nevertheless, I have often been present at discussions with him and have occasionally heard him lecture. In 1917 I read a paper to the Aristotelian Society, perhaps one of the most muddled papers that have ever been presented to that assembly. I was surprised to see Russell there and I was, I recollect, not a little apprehensive, since the paper contained criticisms of Russell which perhaps even then I suspected to be at best but half-baked. To be apprehensive of criticism is to fail as a philosopher; but the fact must be recorded that I was apprehensive. At the outset of the discussion, not Russell but a man whom I had never seen and took to be quite young, began to ask me questions with a vehement insistence that considerably alarmed me. "What ON EARTH do you mean by that?" he exclaimed again and again, thumping the table as he said "on earth" in a manner that clearly shewed he believed there was no earthly meaning in what I had said. Soon, however, my alarm faded; the vehement philosopher had made me forget not to be a philosopher—nothing mattered except trying to find out what I did mean. In spite of my stumbling replies he managed to elicit the reasons why I had been led to the views I was trying to defend; he shewed me the baselessness of many of my reasons, he unravelled the muddles and enabled me to see more clearly the grain of sense that had been at the back of my inept criticisms. That was my first meeting with Moore, whose name I discovered only towards the end of the discussion. I am inclined to think that this meeting of the Aristotelian Society was somewhat peculiar in the annals of the Society, for the reader of a paper was, before the end of the discussion, convinced that her main contentions were entirely wrong. One does not expect a philosophical society's meeting to end in a conversion, yet such was the result in my case, owing mainly to the vehement and vigorous clarity of Moore and his patience in pursuing the question to its end, and in part to the vigorous and politely ironical criticisms of Russell.
Converts are apt to backslide. So it was in my case. A year later I misrepresented Moore's views in a short paper, hastily written and ill thought out. Moore wrote to me and pointed out the misrepresentation. It was, he said, an "inexcusable misunderstanding". Nevertheless, when I replied, making such defence as I could, Moore replied again. Although he repeated that the mistake was "quite inexcusable", he took the trouble to unravel my muddles, to point out what it was I must have meant to say, if I intended to draw the conclusions I had drawn. Again I replied and once again Moore answered the reply. These two replies covered, in small writing, twenty-four and twenty-six pages respectively of Cambridge foolscap. I refer to this incident since it seems to me to show Moore's quality as a teacher. He hates muddles; to clear up a muddle he will (as I know from my own experience) take the trouble to write to an insignificant person what is in effect a first-rate essay, with no thought of publication, with no backward glance to see what use his correspondent will make of the instruction so freely and patiently given. Never has any academic lecturer been less concerned than Moore that his students and correspondents might plagiarize his views. It is enough for him that the views be clear. He genuinely minds if people are in the outer darkness of a mental fog.
‘“Moore does his thinking in front of the class”, a student (post-graduate, from another University) once complained to me. “And how else could he teach?” I replied. The reply was not regarded as satisfactory: “It is the business of a philosopher to prepare his lecture carefully and to think it out in his study beforehand”, this student maintained, adding—to clinch the matter, as it were—“Why, I reckon Moore has not more than one idea in one lecture, so that scarcely anything has been done by the end of the term.” To me it seemed that one idea, one lecture, was a rather high proportion; but this student had been used to lectures not only thought out beforehand but even typewritten some years before.
One final example. At a symposium of the Aristotelian Society, on “Internal Relations”, the two symposiasts based their remarks on Moore's well-known paper on that subject. Moore expressed genuine surprise that they should do so. He expressed himself as unable to understand what he could possibly have meant by the views he had previously stated, and was quite convinced that they were wrong’ (1942: 530–2). [1]
[1] Stebbing, S. (1942) ‘Moore’s Influence’, in The philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. A. Schilpp, New York NY: Tudor Pub. Co., pp. 517–32.