On taking a shit

[Amity]

@Leontiskos

@Amity

I’m still enjoying learning and following Philippa Foot in @Banno’s other, more substantive discussion.

I spent a fair amount of time in this thread showing how Foot’s early work, including her paper on hypothetical morality, is largely obsolete, being rejected even by Foot herself in later years. I realize this is unfortunate to those who think that paper should be identified with Foot’s mature work, but it just didn’t turn out that way. If I had written the thread you are speaking about I would have pointed this out to everyone in the OP.

Thank you. Your need to show this is obvious and understandable. But not necessary to repeat in every single thread about Foot, is it?

I admire the fact that Foot’s work progressed through different stages — early, middle and late. As I said: I am intrigued to observe her thinking process in the context and mores of her time.

@Banno in his OP, supplied a link to the relevant Section 3 in the SEP:

Foot: Morality As A System Of Hypothetical Imperatives - Ethics - The Philosophy Forum

The SEP article ends ( Section 6) with a poignant story: the case of a farm boy from the Sudetenland who chose to die rather than to serve the Nazis.^[8] In a letter to his family he writes,

We did not sign up for the SS, and so they condemned us to death. Both of us would rather die than stain our consciences with such deeds of horror. (RG 2; see Gollwitzer et al. 1956) Philippa Foot (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Links include:

“Philippa Ruth Foot 1920–2010”, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XI: 176–196. [Hursthouse 2012 available online]

and from Thompson, Michael, 2003, “Three Degrees of Natural Goodness”, https://sites.pitt.edu/~mthompso/three.pdf
…

I am grateful to Banno, you, and others for showing a sustained and knowledgeable background capturing the worth of Philippa Foot. Even if, or because, it leads to more questions on central questions.

@Banno

Natural Goodness as an extension and deepening of the earlier project’s anti-Kantian thrust, not a repudiation of it. See the SEP biography, in which much of MSHI’s apparatus, including the etiquette analogy, the categorical/hypothetical grammar point, and especially her naturalistic commitments survive in revised form into Natural Goodness rather than being disowned.

That she revised her earlier work is a credit to her intellectual honesty.

Indeed. It is part of the philosophical process, no?

It is good to know at which point of someone’s life, career and thought we are reading. It is as much the reader’s responsibility, to follow through, as it is the author’s…to situate the views and arguments at a moment in time.

I’ll leave this now.