Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
St Cuthbert Churchyard
Kirkleatham, Redcar and Cleveland Unitary Authority, North Yorkshire, England
Phillipa Ruth Foot FBA (née Bosanquet; 3 October 1920 – 3 October 2010) was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, who was inspired by the ethics of Aristotle. She is credited (along with Judith Jarvis Thomson) with inventing the so-called trolley problem.[1][2] She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. She was a granddaughter of the U.S. President Grover Cleveland.[3]: 354
Born Philippa Ruth Bosanquet in Owston Ferry, North Lincolnshire, she was the daughter of Esther Cleveland (1893–1980) and Captain William Sidney Bence Bosanquet (1893–1966) of the Coldstream Guards of the British Army. Her paternal grandfather was barrister and judge, Sir Frederick Albert Bosanquet, Common Serjeant of London from 1900 to 1917. Her maternal grandfather was the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, brother of Rose Cleveland. Foot was educated privately and at Somerville College, Oxford, 1939–1942, where she obtained a first-class degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. Her association with Somerville, interrupted only by government service as an economist from 1942 to 1947, continued for the rest of her life. She was a lecturer in philosophy, 1947–1950, fellow and tutor, 1950–1969, senior research fellow, 1969–1988, and honorary fellow, 1988–2010. She spent many hours there in debate with G. E. M. Anscombe, who persuaded her that non-cognitivism was misguided. In the 1960s and 1970s, Foot held a number of visiting professorships in the United States – at Cornell, MIT, Berkeley, and City University of New York. She was appointed Griffin Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1976 and taught there until 1991, dividing her time between the United States and England.[4] Contrary to common belief, Foot was not a founder of Oxfam. She joined the organization about six years after its foundation. She was once married to the historian M. R. D. Foot,[6] and at one time shared a flat with the novelist Iris Murdoch.[7]
Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot had a 60-year friendship, although there was a brief period around 1968 when their friendship became physical. Soon, as Philippa explained, they realised that their feeling for each other was "not best expressed" in that way. The affair quietly ended; they remained close and loving friends for another 30 years. "Essential you" was how Iris described her friend. Philippa called Iris, after her death, "the light of my life". They met in Oxford in the autumn of 1939, as the war was starting. Iris was 20 and had been at Somerville for a year; Philippa Bosanquet was a year younger. They were both studying philosophy. They had eager, brilliant minds but were otherwise very different. Philippa was cooler, taller, more elegant and upper class; she grew up in a grand house in Yorkshire with governesses, ponies and plenty of money. Iris's parents were Irish; born in Dublin, she was smaller, rounder, fairer, more intense and better educated. By late 1943, both with first-class degrees, they were happily sharing a cavernous, cold, mouse-ridden flat in Seaforth Place in London and working as civil servants. Iris was writing long letters to (among others) her platonic love, Frank Thompson, while experimenting with several admirers, including Michael Foot (the future historian, not the Labour politician). Philippa was precariously involved with a former tutor, the clever, predatory economist Tommy Balogh. Within a few months, in an emotional dance her readers might now call Murdochian, Iris had dismissed Foot, who was distraught, and taken up with Balogh, thus badly wounding her friend. Before long the unreliable Balogh was gone, Philippa and Michael Foot had fallen in love and Iris found herself excluded, unloved and unwanted. By the time the war ended, Philippa and Michael – who had survived being wounded and captured on an SOE mission to France – were married, Frank Thompson was dead, murdered by fascists in Bulgaria, and Iris had failed to find a lasting love. In the bleak winter of 1946 she wrote a handful of letters that show how deep the damage had been. The Foots were living happily in Oxford, teaching and studying; she was with her parents in Chiswick, trying and failing to find an academic post. "It seems perhaps a foolish useless gesture after so long," she wrote, "to say – I'm so sorry I caused you both to suffer - but I do say it, most humbly, and believe me I do feel it." As well as a plea for forgiveness, her letter read like a declaration. "Pippa, you know without my telling you that my love for you remains as deep and tender as ever – and always will remain, it is so deep in me and so much part of me. I cannot imagine that anyone will ever take your place. I think of you very often. My dear heart, I love you." Philippa's reply evidently reassured her. "The fact that you do, after all that, still care for me gives me great hope that the past will fall away and this good thing between us will grow and be stronger than ever. Love can work miracles." She was right to fear that Michael found seeing her a strain, but as long as she had not lost Philippa all was well. "I rest, as always, in the thought of your love. My dear, you are most precious to me, most close, always in my heart." Even so, it struck their friends as odd that when Iris was offered a job in Oxford in 1948, she became, for a time, the Foots' lodger.
In 1959, Michael Foot fell in love with someone else and Philippa Foot was alone again. Almost at once, her friendship with Iris intensified; Iris confessed in her journal "a certain sense of relief after the removal of the barrier between P and me …" A letter came from Philippa saying that to find Iris "meant very much to her". Iris felt able to talk to her freely again. In the late 1950s Iris, whose bisexuality became more apparent as she grew older, took up with the openly lesbian writer Brigid Brophy; and there were affairs with other women too, one of which shook her marriage and led to the decision to leave Oxford in 1963 for London and a teaching position at the Royal College of Art. With Philippa beginning to spend more time teaching in the US, Iris reflected on their bond and her nature. "I think I was in love with you in Seaforth days," one letter from the early 60s reads, "and this has never stopped. I trust you don't mind. (Given a fair field in early youth I think I might have become a pretty serious homosexual. However its too late to undo that damage now.)"
From 1963 to 1967 Murdoch taught one day a week in the General Studies department at the Royal College of Art.[3] The long friendship between Murdoch and Philippa Foot became, around 1968, a short-lived love affair; Philippa later gave the impression that it was Iris who decided that only by physical expression could the last barriers between them be removed. By 1969 the affair was over; and that year Philippa resigned her Somerville fellowship and moved to the US, eventually becoming a professor at the University of California. She returned every year to Oxford; a stream of blue air letters from Iris continued for the next 20 years, always affectionate, always concerned. She hoped her friend would find a new love and wrote to her of "the wonder and miracle of love springing up again – the surprises of the world! Good, good … Grab and distribute all the happiness you can."
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