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Depicting Human Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

Clare Mac Cumhaill*
Affiliation:
Durham University

Abstract

This paper involves constructive exegesis. I consider the contrast between morality and art as sketched in Philippa Foot's 1972 paper of the same name, ‘Morality and Art’. I then consider how her views might have shifted against the background of the conceptual landscape afforded by Natural Goodness (2001), though the topic of the relation of art and morality is not explicitly explored in that work. The method is to set out some textual fragments from Natural Goodness that can be arranged for a tentative Footian ‘aesthetics’. I bring them into conversation with some ideas from Iris Murdoch to elucidate what I think the import may be, for Foot, of depicting human form.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2020

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References

1 Moore, G.E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1903/1922), 189Google Scholar.

2 Virginia Woolf, 1908, quoted in Rosenbaum, S. P., ‘The Philosophical Realism of Virginia Woolf’, in Rosenbaum, S.P. ed. English Literature and British Philosophy, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), 319Google Scholar.

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5 Philippa Foot, ‘Morality and Art’, in Moral Dilemma (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 7.

6 Op. cit. note 5, 15.

7 I have adapted some natural historical judgments from those narrated in David Attenborough's Planet Earth II.

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19 Op. cit. note 9, 114.

20 Op. cit. note 8, Postscript.

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22 This paper was given at Gordon Square, on 15th March 2019, as one of the Royal Institute of Philosophy London Lectures on Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch. I am very grateful to my Durham colleagues Joe Saunders, Andy Hamilton and Ben Smith for comments on a draft. I am especially indebted to Rachael Wiseman for endless and illuminating discussion on these and related themes.