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Avrum Stroll. Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. PP. 96. Cloth, S35.0
Avrum Stroll aims to provide a "critical analysis" of the treatment of the epistemological issues to be found in three of G. E. Moore's papers and in Wittgenstein's notes On Certainty. In the first half of the book, Stroll concentrates on Moore's papers "A Defence of Common Sense" (DCS), "Proof of an External World" (PEW), and "Certainty" (C) (these papers have recently been reprinted in the new collection of Moore's Selected Writings, published in 1993 by Routledge). Stroll largely follows the view that in these papers Moore presents a dogmatic response to sceptical arguments-insisting that he knows for certain what the sceptic denies that he knows, and yet refusing to argue in detail for his claims to knowledge or against the sceptic's arguments that these claims are mistaken. Stroll calls this Moore's "non-argumentative counter-strategy," and perhaps it is an interesting dialectical strategy-Stroll says (50) "it is an achievement few philosophers have surpassed." But the important point here is that it was not the strategy of the historical G. E. Moore, who explicitly disavowed it in his "A Reply to My Critics" in The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed....