Posted on 03/15/2018 6:20:39 AM PDT by C19fan
Oxford University will ‘feminise’ its philosophy curriculum in order to appeal to more female students and boost writers profiles.
The university’s Faculty of Philosophy requested that 40 per cent of the recommended authors on its reading lists are women.
Academic staff have also been asked to use writers’ first names when compiling reading lists instead of their initials, in order to highlight those that were written by women.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Just 40%? That’s still not fair for the fairer sex which makes up 51% or the human race.
A good read or bad read isn’t based on sex or skin color.
What makes her the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century? That covers a large amount of work by others
I'm actually not in a position to make that judgment myself, since I am not a philosopher and an unable to evaluate such a large body of work.
I make this claim only because her peers have said so for decades, and also because her critique of previous modern ethical systems (Modern Moral Philosophy, 1968) was so devastating as to take down whole schools of thought by showing they had no defensible foundation.
It seems to me (a non-academic) that one doesn't have to have comprehensive knowledge of a multi-unit edifice if you can point out the whole damn thing was built on quicksand.
Well her analytical philosophy is of the same school as Bertrand Russell
You say her peers without naming them.
What of hers have you read?
The first in the list of philosophers who thought Anscombe absolutely first-rate would be the incomparable Wittgenstein. He even directed that once his own works were translated into English with explanatory notes by Amscombe, it's her translations, and not his originals, which should be considered his corpus of work, since he claimed she understood his thinking better than he did.
Mary Warnock described Anscombe as "the undoubted giant among women philosophers" while John Haldane said she "certainly has a good claim to be the greatest woman philosopher of whom we know." Roger Scruton wrote that Anscombe was "perhaps the last great philosopher [not "woman philosopher," but "philosopher"] writing in English."[I confirmed my notes with these quotes from Wikipedia]
Then Philippa Foot (who unstintingly praises her as the master and mentor of the whole school of Virtue Ethics, the greatest of them all), Michael Dummett, Iris Murdoch, Donald Davidson, Charles Taylor, John Searle.
And Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, John McDowell.
I realize I'm just name-dropping here. But this is what I find without sorting.
She was Wittengenstein’s student
Can you in simple every day terms explain virtue ethics?
What I learned in philosophy class is that a bunch of academics spend countless words trying to prove that you either can or cannot count the number of angels that dance on the head of a pin.
Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch ...
People a lot smarter than you or me.
But actually, there is no shortage of philosophers of all colors and genders nowadays.
Whether they're any good is another matter.
I appreciate Arenst’s work
Why is it that women have to have special changes done to appeal to them? I am a woman and I am fine with all that was before.
All Virtue Ethic isn't Christian (a Jew or Buddhist or agnostic or whatever could get into Virtue Ethics) and Anscombe herself, a profoundly committed adult convert to Catholicism, did not make Catholicism per se the focus of her academic work.
But I think if you wanted to put it in Christian terms. a Christian would say it is centered on the soul: is this action (or choice or attitude) tending toward the truth and goodness of my soul, or is it corrosive of goodness? What would Christ /(or the Confucists would say, the Son of Heaven, the ideal sage/ the perfect virtuous person, do in the same circumstances?
What Virtue Ethics is not is rule-centered, or duty-centered, or shall we say cookbook-centered: it's not just a matter of establishing a pre-programmed theory and then applying it across all circumstances. It's person-centered: you continually are asking and answering the question: does this really make for human excellence?
It's also not consequences-centered. It's concerned with the development and integrity of a person's life, rather than a computer print-out of all possible consequences (which are, anyway, impossible to calculate and, in the long run, beyond our control.)
Virtue Ethics would say you foster a good society primarily by helping people develop well-formed consciences and a good character, rather than primarily by developing a Law Code That Covers Everything and then using penalties and deterrents to bad actions.
The main idea is, a person with a deliberately cultivated, well-formed conscience acts in a virtuous way as the result of rational thought and deliberate choice, rather than feelings or instincts, fear of punishment, or mere conformity to society's norms and expectations.
This answer is probably too long for you, but I didn't have time to write it shorter!
No that was just fine
To me that is why I don’t enjoy most philosophers or philosophy. Give me CS Kewis any old time. I’m probably considered a troglodyte because I think that if I love my neighbor as myself and work at keeping the Ten Commandments then God is pleased. That is what I care about
Amen. I think we’re pretty much on the same page.
And thanks for taking the time to engage thoughtfully
It was a pleasure
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