Virtues and Reasons

About Philippa Foot: Philippa Foot has been associated with Oxford University since 1939, when she started her PPE degree. She taught and worked at Somerville College from 1947 to 1969, and has been a Fellow since 1949. From 1969 to 1991 she worked in the USA, holding Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Cornell, MIT, UCLA, Washington, Berkeley, the Graduate Centre at CUNY, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, Princeton, and Stanford; from 1976 she held the post of Professor in Residence at UCLA. She is the author of Virtues and Vices (1978) and the editor of the volume on Theories of Ethics in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series (1967). She is one of the founding members of OXFAM, and all royalties from sales of this volume will be donated to that charity.

A short review cannot hope to do justice to all the interesting (and controversial) material to be found in these dedicatory essays.

• Practical Inference ; The Flight to Reality ; Applying Virtue Ethics ; Philippa Foot on Double Effect ; The Rationality of Morality ; Two Sorts of Naturalism ; Putting Rationality in its Place ; Notes on Unfairly Gaining More: Pleonexia ; Fear of Relativism ; The Representation of Life ; Categorical Requirements: Kant and Hume on the Idea of Duty ; Acts and Omissions, Doing and Not-Doing ; Bibliography of Works by Philippa Foot