Julius Kovesi and The Quartet: Another way of remaking moral philosophy

Abstract

This article situates the Australian moral philosopher Julius Kovesi (1930–1989) in the context of the ‘Quartet’ of women philosophers—Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley—with whom he was associated in various ways. His connections with the Quartet have not been documented previously, but they are not minor or incidental. Foot herself credits him with being one of the ‘members of a small band of guerrillas fighting the prevailing orthodoxy of anti‐naturalist emotivism and prescriptivism in ethics, and challenging the Humean doctrine of the gap between “is” and “ought”’. The evidence shows that Kovesi made a distinctive contribution to the reshaping of moral philosophy that the Quartet were developing. In particular, it shows him as developing a Wittgensteinian but not an Aristotelian moral philosophy.