Foot, Philippa(1920–)
In the last half of the twentieth century, few philosophers figured as prominently and persistently in the central debates of English-speaking moral philosophy as Philippa Foot. Née Philippa Ruth Bosanquet, she was born in 1920 in Owston Ferry, Lincolnshire, in the United Kingdom. She studied for the PPE (philosophy, political science, and economics) at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1939 to 1942. After receiving an MA in 1947, she became the Sommerville's first philosophy tutorial fellow in 1949 and vice principal in 1967. Moving to the United States, she held positions at Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, New York University, and Stanford University. She settled at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1976 and became the first holder of the Gloria and Paul Griffin Chair in Philosophy in 1988, which she held until her retirement in 1991. A founder of Oxfam, she has been instrumental in bringing philosophy to bear on practical issues.
Although her work on such practical topics as abortion and euthanasia has been widely and justly influential, Foot's fundamental contributions are to the foundational questions of moral theory. Her publications in moral theory concentrate on three interlocking themes: the notion that virtue is central to morality, naturalism in ethics, and the place of practical reason in the moral life.
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