October 3, 1920

Philippa Foot, October 3, 1920 to October 3, 2010) was an English thinker, who focused on questions of ethics.

An example of her ideas: Foot  addressed the fact/value dichotomy by pointing to a bigger picture. We quote this summary:

'”They have four legs,” we say of cats or of cat-form; ”They bloom in spring,” we say of cherries or of cherry-form. ”It has four legs”, we say of this cat hic et nunc; ”It bloomed last spring” we say of the cherry tree in the garden. The properties expressed by these predicates may be said to ”characterize” the life forms cat and cherry respectively, and to “hold of” the individual cat or cherry tree in question. The predicates may of course fail to hold of many individual bearers of the life forms they characterize; it may even, in suitable cases, fail to be true of most of them. Where the characterizing predicates do fail to hold – where a cat has three legs or a cherry does not bloom – we have natural defect, a failure of elementary ”natural goodness.” '

Foot is famous for her revival of the "trolley problem," which hypothesizes a choice between degrees of unfortunate events: is it better to sacrifice one person's life, if doing so saves five people. An aspect of such thought experiments is their reliance on binary thought. That the choices may involve more than two situations may clarify rather than confuse, the pursuit of philosophical calm, the peace of an adequate answer. By this I mean if the questioner has the experience to include their own mental acuity in the formula, they might find the dilemma dissolves by the realization of  the questioner's own interior philosophical calm. If this is an achievement that factors in the problem, then the answer may fall out: a different answer in different situations is just, and not necessarily subjective.

About this world famous philosopher we read in her obituary:

'Her mother, Esther Cleveland, had been the first president's child to be born in the White House; William Bosanquet, her father, managed a steelworks in Yorkshire. Born in a small village near Durham, Philippa was educated at home by governesses and at St George's school, Ascot, and rode to hounds with the Zetland hunt. When, during their first riding lessons, her sister Marion held on to the saddle, she thought it not at all the thing, and was "very shocked". To the question of whether she had asked the name and address of a little boy at her dancing class who had asked for hers, she replied, "Of course not – you don't ask for names and addresses if you are a girl."

'Decades later, she was described as the "grande dame of philosophy".'