Responses to Skepticism: Moore's "Here Is a Hand"

G.E. Moore (1873–1958), the Cambridge philosopher central to the early 20th-century revolt against British idealism, mounted one of the best-known modern responses to radical skepticism about the external world in two closely related pieces: "A Defence of Common Sense" (1925, published in the second series of Contemporary British Philosophy, edited by J.H. Muirhead) and, more famously, "Proof of an External World," delivered as the British Academy's Henriette Hertz Annual Philosophical Lecture in 1939 and published that year in the Proceedings of the British Academy, volume 25.