Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

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Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

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The privations that the protagonists undergo seems a piffle compared to the everyday life of comparable people in India. The book begins with two short vignettes: one about Elizabeth Anscombe’s speech against the awarding of an honorary degree by oxford to Harry Truman.

It fell to four women philosophers, each born in the years between 1918 and 1920, to object to this sad state of affairs. But this book brings the significance of the womens’ work to life in the context in which their thinking developed in their young adulthood especially intertwining in Oxford and Cambridge.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.

This book first interested me because it had been awhile since I had read any philosophy or non-fiction in general, so I figured a book *about* philosophers' lives would be a nice segue back into it. I hated the references to Ayer as Freddie, but almost threw the book against the wall when they referred to Kant as Immanuel. Metaphysical Animals', depicting intellectual and personal lives of four brilliant women philosophers, shows how philosophy is and ought to relate to everyday life. It is true that the authors only refer to the women as Iris, Mary, Elizabeth, and Philippa, but they are inconsistent with the men and other women, at one point even referring to Rousseau as ‘Jean-Jacques’ weirdly enough. But it also comes with extensive notes and useful suggestions for further reading, as well as an impressive list of contemporary thinkers whose work has been influenced by one or more of these women.A fine account of 4 woman philosophers in the 1930s-1950s in Oxford who changed the course of moral philosophy in the 20th Century. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. 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. She also discovers that when moral values are subjective, we would accept everything as a moral value, which we obviously don’t. When Hughes Murdoch died after forty-five years in England, there were only six people at his funeral.

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. The authors spend some time discussing Susan Stebbings-should have been longer- and Freddie Ayer, and his soul-destroying positivism. Philippa Foot was the creator of the famous Trolley problem, which I found utterly silly, like most philosophic ‘thought experiments’ (where fat men get stuck in the opening of caves which are about to be flooded or Rawls’ original position behind of veil of ignorance – I think there’s one where you have to shove a fat man in front of a train). She had arrived at Somerville to read modern languages in 1911, almost a decade before women were permitted to take degrees.

Is it possible that the stable world of baths and ceilings can be assembled out of such ephemeral fragments? Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman did a wonderful job of integrating the women's journal entries and historical events to their philosophical growth. This was a smart decision as real life doesn't limit itself to a small list of characters which readers can easily follow. Also, after the first fifty pages or so I wondered how deeply this book about four philosophers could go without skimming the surface.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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