About twenty-five years ago, when I was working on my book on G. E. Moore (G. E. Moore, Routledge, 1990), I came across the manuscripts of Moore's Fellowship dissertations which had recently been deposited in the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge. Realising the importance and significance of these dissertations, I formed a plan to prepare an edition of them for publication. But before this could proceed the permission of Moore's son Timothy Moore was needed, and Timothy was unwilling for this to go ahead, on the grounds that his father's reputation might be harmed by the publication of these juvenilia which his father had regarded as confused and unsatisfactory. The matter rested there until Consuelo Preti, while working recently on Moore's early papers, persuaded me to revive the plan to publish his dissertations. By this time Timothy Moore was dead and control of his literary estate had passed to Moore's grandson Peregrine Moore, who was happy to agree to the publication of his grandfather's Fellowship dissertations. We are grateful to him for agreeing to this, and we are confident that, far from being harmed, his grandfather's reputation will only be enhanced by this edition of his early philosophical writings.

In preparing this edition we have both spent a good deal of time in the Wren Library at Trinity College, and it is a pleasure to record our thanks to the Librarian, David McKitterick, and to his staff for their unfailing help and patience as we have returned again and again to check our transcripts of Moore's manuscripts.