Format:
1 Online-Ressource (xxx, 326 Seiten, 8 ungezählte Bildtafeln)
,
Illustrationen
ISBN:
9780197541104
Series Statement:
Oxford scholarship online
Content:
This the story of four philosophers - Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch - who helped shape the intellectual history of the 20th century, reviving the ethical imagination of their time and ours. The Second World War gave these four women their chance, as they pursued roles formerly reserved for men. But they succeeded because of their formidable intelligence and because of who they were: a combative Catholic convert who never cared whom she offended; her unlikely best friend, an atheist who grew up in a world of class and manners; a woman who spent a decade and a half raising her boys, publishing the first of her sixteen books at almost 60; and a mystical novelist who gradually drifted away from the academy. This is a book for those interested in these vivid characters, in the first school of women philosophers, or in alternative ways of thinking about how to live.
Content:
"This book tells two intertwined stories, centered on twentieth-century moral philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. The first is the story of four friends who came up to Oxford together just before WWII. It is the story of their lives, loves, and intellectual preoccupations; it is a story about women trying to find a place in a man's world of academic philosophy. The second story is about these friends' shared philosophical project, and their unintentional creation of a school of thought that challenged the dominant way of doing ethics. That dominant school of thought envisioned the world as empty, value-free matter, on which humans impose meaning. This outlook treated statements such as "this is good" as mere expressions of feeling or preference, reflecting no objective standards. It emphasized human freedom and demanded an unflinching recognition of the value-free world. The four friends diagnosed this moral philosophy as an impoverishing intellectual fad. This style of thought, they believed, obscured the realities of human nature and left people without the resources to make difficult moral choices or to confront evil. As an alternative, the women proposed a naturalistic ethics, reviving a line of thought running through Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, and enriched by modern biologists like Jane Goodall and Charles Darwin. The women proposed that there are, in fact, moral truths, based in facts about the distinctive nature of the human animal and what that animal needs to thrive"--
Note:
Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 311-319
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9780197541074
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Druck-Ausgabe Lipscomb, Benjamin J. Bruxvoort The women are up to something New York : Oxford University Press, 2022 ISBN 9780197541074
Language:
English
Subjects:
Philosophy
Keywords:
Anscombe, G. E. M. 1919-2001
;
Foot, Philippa 1920-2010
;
Midgley, Mary 1919-2018
;
Murdoch, Iris 1919-1999
;
Ethik
DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780197541074.001.0001
Author information:
Lipscomb, Benjamin J. Bruxvoort
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