Abstract

This fitting Festschrift contains twelve essays by students, colleagues and friends of Philippa Foot, all of them leading figures in philosophy. Some deal directly and even centrally with Foot’s own work, the others with topics she has herself written on and in a manner relatively sympathetic to what she has said about those topics. Foot’s interests in ethics have been fairly wide-ranging, and that fact is well reflected in the essays of the present volume. Elizabeth Anscombe writes on ‘Practical Inference’; Simon Blackburn on ‘The Flight to Reality’; Rosalind Hursthouse on ‘Applying Virtue Ethics’; Anthony Kenny on ‘Philippa Foot on Double Effect’; Gavin Lawrence on ‘The Rationality of Morality’; John McDowell on ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’; Warren Quinn on ‘Putting Rationality in its Place’; David Sachs on ‘Notes on Unfairly Gaining More: Pleonexia’; Thomas Scanlon on ‘Fear of Relativism’; Michael Thompson on ‘The Representation of Life’; David Wiggins on ‘Categorical Requirements: Kant and Hume on the Idea of Duty’; and Bernard Williams on ‘Acts and Omissions: Doing and Not Doing’. A short review cannot hope to do justice to all the interesting (and controversial) material to be found in these dedicatory essays. And rather than attempt to discuss even two or three of them, I think it better to choose a single one for closer consideration, namely, Warren Quinn’s rich and fascinating critique of subjectivist/instrumentalist views of practical reason.