Background
Foot, Phllippa Ruth was born in 1920 in Owston Ferry.
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Phllippa Ruth Foot
Edit ProfileEducation
Somerville College, Oxford, /offs: Aristotle. Aquinas, Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe.
Career
1949-1969, Fellow, 1967-1969. Vice-Principal, 1969-1989, Senior Research Fellow, Honorary Fellow, Somerville College. Oxford: 1976-1999, Professor of Philosophy, 1989-present, 1988-1991, Griffin Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Los Angeles.
Other visiting positions in the United States. 1976, Fellow of the British Academy: 1983. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Views
In her early work Foot attacked the antinaturalism. characteristic of intuitionism, emotivism and prescriptivism, which held that it was impossible to derive moral judgements from factual ones. She argued that moral terms have determinate descriptive meanings, and that this lays down logical limits on what might count as a good or bad moral argument. Whether certain behaviour is courageous or just, for instance—- supposedly evaluative judgements—can often be straightforwardly settled by appeal to the facts and to the meanings of terms. Further, given the conditions that, as human beings, we inevitably find ourselves in, it will be impossible for an individual to live a satisfactory life without virtues such as courage and justice. It is possible, then, to mount an argument to show that we should be courageous or just, an argument from which no one could sensibly dissent. In her later writings Foot came to question one element of this, namely the idea that everyone necessarily has a reason to be moral. She argued against Kantian styles of moral philosophy that morality is not a system of law valid for all rational beings as such. Its requirements stem only from the desires that we actually have. It is possible to lack those desires, and moral requirements will simply not hold for anyone who does so. Morality is thus a system of 'hypothetical imperatives’. Foot's early work had considerable impact against the prescriptivism of R. M Hare. Her later work has been particularly instrumental in placing the virtues at the centre of moral philosophy. Sources: Who’s Who 1992; personal communication.
