This is one of the more philosophically substantial reviews I've seen; an excerpt:
Those in the grip of the picture that is supposed to result in inaction on the ethical stage were progressive socialists for the most part, heavily involved on the ground in political and ethical matters. Ayer was a left-wing activist and agitated against appeasement. The members of the Vienna Circle objected, in strong words and actions, to Nazism. Those who manged to flee (often to America) were engaged in progressive politics there. Hare had been a prisoner of war, building the Burma-Thailand railway under inhuman conditions, doing countless good deeds for his fellow POWs along the way. He worked out his philosophical theory during this time and would become a leading utilitarian in the 20th century, a philosophical project deeply committed to social reform and individual improvement. He wrote papers on topics ranging from slavery to abortion to whether we shouldn’t eat animals.
Do we not require an explanation for how the [proponents of a philosophical outlook]...so apparently bloodless for ethics, could be believed by philosophers acting so powerfully at the moral coalface, at the place where whatever views they had about ethics met practical problems?...
Here’s [one] possible answer. Ayer and the members of the Vienna Circle found it liberating to distinguish fact from value, so that they could escape the constraints of the so-called ethical facts, which were lodged within a religious framework that dictated what was right and what was wrong.
Indeed, Anscombe was locked into such a framework – the Catholic one. She was a vehement opponent of abortion, blocking clinics and going out of her way to abuse pro-choice advocates. It was exactly these kinds of “objective” moral prisons from which Ayer and the Vienna Circle were trying to escape. (Anscombe was ethically challenged in other ways as well. Lipscomb relates how she berated and discarded a good friend when the friend married Austin, whom she loathed. Her neighbour, the literary critic John Cary, asked the unruly Anscombe/Geach household to stop blasting music from open windows at all hours. He was told by one of the many children that it was “no good” complaining about that, as “the whole street got up a petition about us once, but it didn’t have any effect.”)
The second problem with Lipscomb’s philosophical argument is that, while the four women did hugely important work, it doesn’t seem right to say they effected a revolution – a change in the very way in which we think. Frank Ramsey from the 1920s and Wittgenstein from the 1930s had also been pushing for a focus on the particular. Sure, they were Cambridge philosophers, but everyone in 1940s Oxford was reading them. Indeed, Lipscomb recounts how Anscombe went to Cambridge after her undergraduate degree and fell under the spell of Wittgenstein, becoming one of his favourite and most successful pupils. When she returned to Oxford in 1946 “as Wittgenstein’s apostle to Oxford, she would help her friends see an alternative to the theory of ethics ascending there.” So was Wittgenstein the real revolutionary? We cannot say even that. Dewey in America was a strong philosophical voice against the fact/value dichotomy and for an ethics grounded in particular, down to earth, human experience before Wittgenstein. I’m sure we can go back even further. Perhaps the revolution was just within the bounds of Oxford city limits. Such are the perils of trying to identify and name a moment, a turning point, in the history of thought.
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