Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

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The book focuses mainly on the 1930s to the 1950s, following the four from their undergraduate years to the start of their professional careers. I really enjoyed learning about these women’s lives and the book has sparked my interest in further reading their philosophies as well as exploring more feminine (feminist) metaphysical and moral perspectives, but this was a difficult read to stay focused on and enjoy for its own sake. The other is Philippa foot, writing a very long letter, pleading that Somerville offer Elizabeth a job. 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. Philosophy from a female perspective allowed for a genuine curiosity freed from the posturing and arrogance so many young men would bring into the classroom, and allowed the influence that their friendships, romances (and later on, experiences as mothers) had on them to shape their views.

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. The authors use as a framing device Oxford's awarding of an honorary degree to Harry Truman in 1956. The philosophy is not just presented alongside the biography, but the authors seem to have managed to show how the developments were linked - thus Foot's philosophical persuasion that ethics is more than a formal study (despite Hare), Anscombe's revisiting of Aristotelian methods in Intentions and in virtue ethics. Forget the rudeness; it’s unkind to readers to have to do mental calculations to figure out who they’re talking about. 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.

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. As an amateur evolutionist I am also reading Mary Midgley’s The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene with enjoyment as well as Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good, especially for a character based on Philippa.

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. On Professor Jerusalem’s release, he, Frau Jerusalem and their fourteen-year-old daughter Leni managed to escape Austria to join Mary and her family at their home. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Nonetheless, this book deserves 4* for highlighting how the significant female philosophers surveyed revitalised ethics as a serious subject for philosophical study.The biographical parts of the book describe life for these women as students in the late 1930s and early 1940s as England was gripped by war, and hundreds of their male classmates left. Anscombe objected to this because of Truman's authorization of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she tried to persuade the dons not to award the degree. The majority of prominent philosophers were single men that devoted their lives to philosophy, far away from children, gardens, stoves, friends, voluntary work, and poetry. In conclusion, the book would have benefited from more psychological depth to better understand its subjects' personalities and motivations.

Scenes such as Mary and Iris in wartime London eating their fish-paste sandwiches in butterfly-filled, London squares because the mass flight of birds from the bombing has allowed caterpillars to thrive; Iris’s later travels and meetings with Sartre; Elizabeth’s tangles with Wittgenstein at Cambridge.

To me they were both worth reading, but someone with less philosophical and biographical obsession would probably get more out of the other book. All four developed original and lasting contributions to philosophy and this book is superb at showing the intellectual development of each of them. The occasion of World War II, with its concomitant dispersal of the usual, overwhelmingly male, student body at Oxford and Cambridge into active service, as well as the arrival of intellectual Continental refugees, and the gradually revealed horrors of the Nazi regime, provide a unique opening for the four remarkable and brilliant protagonists of this narrative.

In their first year of Greats, Iris and Mary would have the pick of fourteen lecture courses dedicated to works over 2,000 years old. But the devotion of the fellows to scholarship and to the success of their students was uncompromising. I recently read Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein but this book throws a light on Wittgenstein’s intellectual relationship with the four women that is unknown to most of the public including most philosophers. Miss Colebrook, the school secretary, wrote to Iris’s delighted parents that her scholarship had been announced in The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the local newspapers: ‘It looks very well’. Iris was a remarkable girl, who already had a philosophy of life’, BMB told the girls in the year below.This book is helpful in shining a light on four women who cast a critical gaze on the arid academic discipline of British philosophy in mid-20th century, when philosophical study was limited to the abstract consideration of language and grammar. She had arrived at Somerville to read modern languages in 1911, almost a decade before women were permitted to take degrees. Speaking as Dean, she warned that any misstep, any rule-breaking or scandal, would injure not only themselves but future generations of aspirant women scholars.