Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

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Our four protagonists, temporarily free to develop their own views now that the men weren't using up all the oxygen, began to develop a moral philosophy that challenged Ayer's position. Besides the specific philosophical issues Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman do an excellent job of showing the personal interrelationship of the four friends. She was more likely to find a fountain pen leaking in her pocket than a glove or compact, or anything betokening a grown-up female life.

Anscombe, does admirably stood up against Oxford’s giving of an honorary degree to Harry Truman, former President of the USA. It makes for a good story also invites you to think and experience some of these same things for yourself. In their unfashionable view that it is possible, as Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman put it, to ‘use [the] language of morals and speak of objective moral truth’, and their conviction that human beings are ‘social, creative, curious, spiritual’ creatures rather than mere ‘efficient calculating machines’, the four heroines of this book were untimely. Dishy and intimate, you’ll feel as if you’ve been invited to afternoon tea with the smartest set on campus. Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt.Iris Murdoch learns that she would draw the face of someone she had not recognized for a second differently before and after the moment of recognizing. There is also something to be said about the tone of a piece that refers to the key women with first names, but the men with last names. Feminist philosophy has burgeoned in recent decades and includes a monumental contribution to ethical-moral thought that draws from ancient philosophy. I did not find the Truman honorary degree story that bookends the text particularly helpful though it was a significant event in Elizabeth Anscombe’s life.

She vigorously resisted her mother’s attempts to put her hair in a Marcel wave – ‘it’s far too stiff. Philippa, reared as an aristocrat by governesses who taught her nothing, took the softer option of PPE (now the common choice of future British politicians) and achieved a first as well. Le Guin puts forth a similar view on this subject in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. The payoff is four glorious heroines, confident and curious, focused on the world and not themselves.We see Scrutton and Murdoch meet at Somerville, later joined by Foot, a strange place in which trousers were considered a cause for reprimand but brainy girls were encouraged. To me they were both worth reading, but someone with less philosophical and biographical obsession would probably get more out of the other book. What actually brought this book to my attention was a review of it in Philosophy Now Magazine, where the reviewer criticized the authors’ use of first names for the women, but not for the men. In the 1970s and 80s, Carol Gilligan discovered that this difference is the crux of what distinguished the hitherto neglected ways of thinking of girls and women from those of their male counterparts who had been viewed as models of mature moral thought. Cozy and yet cosmic, Metaphysical Animals is a great choice for amateur philosophers and appreciators of well-written, history-making accounts alike.

This text also changed my perception of well-known philosophical stories by their relation to various groups of thought. And at times, it portrayed them as scatter-brained willful vagabonds, even Foot for a time, who really have no admirable qualities, certainly not any that one would want to emulate. Mary was thinking thoughts that had troubled the mind of the ancient philosopher Protagoras, on an island in the Aegean Sea, 450 years before the birth of Christ. I think I would have preferred all to be referenced by last name—especially after the women graduated with Firsts. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman] succeed splendidly at showing how Anscombe, Midgley, Murdoch, and Foot personified the truism that philosophy is the primal stuff of life.If things had gone to plan, Mary would have arrived at Somerville fresh from Vienna, her German fluent, her conversation studded with casual references to Viennese culture and art. Then World War 2 happened, and Ayer and the other male proponents of logical positivism went off to war, leaving an Oxford filled with women as well as older men and refugees who could not serve (such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose pupil, translator, and editor Anscombe became). This edifying debut by philosophy professors Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman tells the stories of four female philosophy pioneers: Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch . Is it possible that the stable world of baths and ceilings can be assembled out of such ephemeral fragments?