Foot, Philippa (1920–2010)

Philippa Foot was a British moral philosopher based primarily at Oxford University, where she was a Fellow of Somerville College from 1950; and at University of California, Los Angeles, where she was Professor of Philosophy from 1976. Deeply influenced by Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as her contemporaries Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, Foot made lasting contributions to the study of moral belief and argument, moral virtue and goodness, reasons for action and practical rationality, and the nature of moral dilemmas. In Natural Goodness she defended an Aristotelian account of value focused on the ‘natural goodness and defects’ of living things (Foot 2001). Foot also made contributions to the study of John Locke, David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche.