Defying the Oracle: The Philosophy of Alice Ambrose

INSPIRE lecture by Dr Sophia Connell (Birkbeck, University of London).

The INSPIRE lecture is an annual event where a leading researcher in the field gives a lecture presenting their research and showing why this research matters. The lecture is open to all researchers and students at South Campus, UCPH.

Abstract

Alice Ambrose Lazerowitz has been primarily known as a follower of Wittgenstein. In this talk, I discuss the nature of her own philosophical methodology and the positions she argued for and supported. Ambrose was uniquely placed in the history of analytic philosophy. She learned and interpreted the philosophical viewpoints of G.E. Moore's later philosophy and Ludwig Wittgenstein middle-period doctrines first-hand in Cambridge in the 1930s. Ambrose went on to apply various of her own interpretations of these philosophical approaches to many difficulties that Moore and Wittgenstein had not themselves worked through. The talk will provide various illustrations of this methodology and its results from the 1940s through to the 1980s. In particular, I consider how Ambrose sought to disentangle seemingly intractable difficulties in the philosophy of mathematics and in metaphysics by insisting on a distinction between philosophical versus empirical propositions.

About Sophia Connell

Sophia M. Connell is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London; in January 2026 she will join the Philosophy Department of the University of Notre Dame. She previously taught philosophy at the University of Cambridge and the University of East Anglia and was a Research Fellow of St Johns College, Cambridge.

Her publications include: Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals (2016) and Aristotle on Women: Physiology, Psychology and Politics (2021). She is the editor ofThe Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Biology (2021) and Aristotle’s Parts of Animals: A Critical Guide (2025) and the co-editor (with Frederique Janssen-Lauret) of Lost Voices: Women in Philosophy 1870-1970 (2023).

The lecture will be streamed live via Zoom. Please register to receive the Zoom link by sending an e-mail to mpb@hum.ku.dk providing your name and affiliation.