Oxforder Materialismus – Zur kritischen Philosophie von Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley und G.E.M. Anscombe (Teil2)

The philosophical project of Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe is directed against analytic philosophy which, when they began their studies, had started to dominate the academic mainstream. The socalled Oxford Four try - each in their own way - to tackle logical abstraction by shifting the focus towards the concrete problems of everyday life. This paper is a short introduction into the positions of Foot, Murdoch, Midgley and Anscombe. It understands their overall philosophical move as a materialistic turn following late Wittgenstein's grounding of philosophy in social praxis. However, the claim of the Oxford Four is in some respect stronger than in Wittgenstein as their ethics boldly tries to conceptualize the Good (life). Comparable with Marx and Adorno they develop a critical, materialist philosophy.