Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

Product Information

As with any good history, there is something eerily prescient in Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s account of a university educated cultural elite for whom moral discourse had declined to the point of linguistic one-upmanship—and the subsequent need to reconnect with a more robust notion of virtue, human flourishing, and what makes for a good life. Anscombe I knew from the title pages of translations of Wittgenstein, whose ideas seemed a confusing mixture of psychology and linguistics consisting of language games. Midgley, famously, learned much of the continuity of humanity and the natural world from dealing with her sons. A vivid picture of the times, and of the formative experiences of the four women who would go on to become some of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. It fell to four women philosophers, each born in the years between 1918 and 1920, to object to this sad state of affairs.

This kind of book is often riddled with speculation, but the authors interviewed Mary Midgley as a primary source, who was the only one still alive before this book was published.This interest in a philosophy that’s not divorced from the day to day, or the realities of engaging with human environments, was one that did not hold sway at the point when Midgley, Foot, Murdoch and Anscombe came to Oxford as students in the late 1930s. There were forty-three Somerville entrants that year and, Mrs Z’s astonishment notwithstanding, Iris and Mary were the only two up to read Honour Moderations and Literae Humaniores. Women on the other hand, Midgley maintained, were more likely to be embroiled in intimate relationships with partners and friends, be engaged in their communities or have experienced the raising of children. Professor Jerusalem, Mary’s Jewish host, was among those arrested, and Mary picked her way through the broken glass on the pavement to join a frantic queue at the Quaker meeting house, hoping the Society of Friends could help. As an account of four young women who sought to ‘bring philosophy back to life’, Metaphysical Animals is a portrait in intellectual courage.

Mary Midgley I knew nothing of but since discovered she was famous for her own thought experiment where a Japanese Samurai cleaves a haunch off an innocent passerby to test his new sword.I was bending over a bath, stirring the water before getting into it, when I felt a light tap on the back of my head and the world before me suddenly turned into an expanse of white triangles. Mary may have dodged past Iris in Mrs Z’s hallway that summer, belongings and shoelaces trailing, head buzzing with Greek declensions. Her hair may have been temporarily in an adult roll, but more often it was braided like a Girl Guide’s. But her Austrian adventure had been cut short: she had arrived in the capital a fortnight before the country ceased to exist. I used to regret that when I was at Georgetown our philosophy curriculum was so weighted with scholastic tradition that I was utterly unsuited to what passed for philosophy in most secular American universities.

Bring[s] to life an important episode in intellectual history, and [has] made me again grateful that I was for a time a contemporary of these unforgettable women.Fellow undergraduate Carol Stewart thought Iris ‘aboriginal’: ‘simplicity, naiveté, power, and space’. One of their male philosophical foes, Richard Hare, provided a pithy summary of a main theme of contemporary feminist moral philosophy: "[T]hey all, when I am the target, accuse me of paying too much attention to general principles and too little to the peculiarities of individual cases" (p.