13 Facts About Philippa Foot

Philippa Ruth Foot was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, who was inspired by the ethics of Aristotle.

Philippa Foot was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Philippa Foot was a granddaughter of the US President Grover Cleveland.

Philippa Foot was appointed Griffin Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1976 and taught there until 1991, dividing her time between the United States and Britain.

Contrary to common belief, Philippa Foot was not a founder of Oxfam.

Philippa Foot joined the organization about six years after its foundation.

Philippa Foot's approach was influenced by the later work of Wittgenstein, although she seldom dealt explicitly with his materials.

Philippa Foot objected to this distinction and its underlying account of thin concepts.

Philippa Foot suggests that modern and contemporary philosophers fear to pose this range of questions because they are blinded by an emphasis on a "particular just act" or a particular courageous act, rather than the traits that issue from them.

Philippa Foot would hold that machismo and ladylikeness considerations are artificial and false; they are matters of "mere convention", which tend to put one off the main things.

Philippa Foot's book ends by attempting to defuse the evidence Nietzsche brings against what might be called the common-sense position.

Philippa Foot employs exactly the Nietzschean form of argument against some forms of femininity, for example, or exaggerated forms of etiquette acceptance.

Geoffrey Thomas of Birkbeck College, London, recalls approaching Philippa Foot in 1968, when he was a postgraduate at Trinity College, Oxford, to ask if she would read a draft paper on the relation of ethics to politics.