A topic of Moore’s dissertation works in 1897 and 1898 (Moore 2011) on the metaphysical basis of ethics suggests that key ideas in the classic Principia Ethica of 1903 can be understood in terms of his metaphysics or ontology of the period. This is especially so with respect to his celebrated claim that value properties are non-natural properties. That suggestion was set out in a 1962 paper examining a perplexing and odd ontology developed by the man later known as a, if not the, philosopher of common sense—a man celebrated for proving that two human hands exist by holding up both of his hands and, with appropriate gestures, asserting “Here is one hand, and here is another.” That became a well-known example employed by one of the founding fathers of the development of the 20th century analytic tradition in British philosophy.
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