28 SOMERVILLE MAGAZINE
Anscombe and Foot: Collegiality and Friendship in the Somerville Quartet
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Somerville’s Emeritus Fellow Lesley Brown (l) and Professor Lipscomb (r) at the SLG event
Professor Benjamin Lipscomb is a specialist in moral philosophy and the author of The Women Are Up to Something, one of two new books about the ‘Somerville quartet’ of philosophers comprising Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. As he told the Magazine, Professor Lipscomb had known and admired the work of these women for years, for their insights into human good and evil. But he became interested in the group as a group after reading Midgley’s memoir, The Owl of Minerva, and glimpsing how “a community of friendship that began at Somerville College led to these vital insights.” Lipscomb shared the following extract from the book, which goes some way to capturing the special dynamic of friendship and debate within the Quartet, following a recent lecture delivered to more than seventy members of the Somerville London Group. The lecture, which took place at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, was introduced by Somerville College’s Emeritus Fellow in Philosophy, Lesley Brown, a former student of both Anscombe and Foot.
hilippa Foot looked haggard most days as she mounted the stairs up to Hall for lunch. When she wasn’t delivering the meticulous lectures for which she was known, she was giving tutorials, sometimes backto-back-to-back. For her colleague Elizabeth Anscombe, every tutorial with her modest number of students was an open-ended chance to do philosophy. The bulk of the tutorial load in philosophy fell to Foot. They got the best she could offer within the fixed hour, then she had to move on. She routinely filled 11 or 12 hours a week with regular lessons. Ten was a full load. For her colleague Barbara Harvey, one enduring image of Foot was “her coming into lunch after a morning’s tutorials…a look of complete exhaustion on her face.” Students fearful of philosophy found Foot encouraging. She invariably found something to praise even in the weakest essays. But she offered criticism, too. “More than anyone in Oxford,” a student recalled, “Philippa . . . helped me to grow up. I was clever, but terribly opinionated. She wouldn’t stand for it; she insisted I justify my wilder statements, but . . . so gently that I responded.” Some students, of course, were intimidated by Foot. Her accent and her sharp but conservative dress sense suggested primness. And most Somervillians were aware of Foot’s grand origins. As they came to know her, though, they came to rely on her. She never refused a request
Philippa Foot, 1939 matriculation
