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In post-war Oxford, between the 1950s and the 1980s, a rebellion took shape against prevailing conceptions of morality, and eventually against morality itself. New methods and new approaches to thinking about morality were developed by philosophers including Anscombe, Austin, Foot, Hart, Murdoch, Strawson, Wiggins, and Williams. The main formative influences on this movement in philosophy, as on philosophy in Oxford generally in this period, were the anthropological philosophy of language developed by Wittgenstein in the 1930s and 1940s and the so-called ‘ordinary language’ approach to philosophy championed by J.L. Austin. But Aristotelian ethics, Thomist moral philosophy, and existentialism also fed into this radical movement. This course will examine key articles and chapters by these philosophers, including but not limited to several of the following:
J.L. Austin, A plea for excuses (1957); E. Anscombe, Modern moral philosophy (1958); P. Foot, Moral beliefs (1959); J.L. Hart, The Concept of Law, ch. 8 (1961); P.F. Strawson, Social morality and individual ideal (1961); I. Murdoch, The idea of perfection (1964); B/ Williams, Morality and the emotions (1965); I. Murdoch, The sovereignty of good over other concepts (1967); P. Foot, Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives (1972); D. Wiggins, Truth, invention, and the meaning of life (1976); E. Anscombe: Medallist’s address: Action, Intention, and ‘double effect’ (1982); P. Foot, Morality, action and, outcome (1985); B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, ch. 10 (1985).
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