Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

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So much for the story. What about the argument? Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman read these women as claiming that we are indeed metaphysical animals: language-using, question-asking, picture-making creatures who seek the mysterious and the transcendent. Those of us versed in the kind of analytic philosophy that descends from Ayer are likely to want more by way of clarification and support. But such a demand might miss the other part of the book’s argument: that this insight was available to the quartet only because they lived lives filled with lovers, dependents, politics and war. For Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, the philosophical insights of Anscombe, Murdoch, Foot and Midgley are not independent of the kinds of lives that they led. This is quite an unusual book. It follows four different people that were a close group and all highly interested in philosophy: Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgle. I knew nothing of them beyond Murdoch, which I've read and greatly enjoyed. They were all students at Oxford while most men were away to fight in World War I.

Meticulously researched, Metaphysical Animals paints a vivid portrait of the friendship between four remarkable female philosophers.” Cumhail and Wiseman provide a list of players at the front of the text. This was a smart decision as real life doesn't limit itself to a small list of characters which readers can easily follow. However, I was confused at times by the choice of using first and last, only first, or only last names. Metaphysical Animals is a sort of origin story of four female philosophers who met as undergraduates at Oxford in the 1930s: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. The book focuses mainly on the 1930s to the 1950s, following the four from their undergraduate years to the start of their professional careers.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST •A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR : TheNew York Times Book Review, The New Yorker The void that men left when they were sent off to the front made space for women in all fields, and British philosophy was transformed by this shift. 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. It's particularly interesting to juxtapose these to those of the solitary existences of the men, most often unmarried, who are overwhelmingly taught as the great philosophical thinkers. Le Guin puts forth a similar view on this subject in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places.

I wanted to like this book, but ultimately I think it could have been so much better. I find the authors’ use of first names deeply annoying. It’s overly familiar to our main characters, which annoys my feminist sensibilities, as well as some well known philosophers. I hated the references to Ayer as Freddie, but almost threw the book against the wall when they referred to Kant as Immanuel. Forget the rudeness; it’s unkind to readers to have to do mental calculations to figure out who they’re talking about. Ayer is Ayer and Kant is Kant. Overall, for readers interested in philosophy or even just this cultural period, this is an enjoyable and rewarding book about four fascinating women whose philosophy deserves more attention. It will probably make you want to read more by these thinkers, and it might even make you want to "do" philosophy! That they played an active part in challenging the rigid materialism of prewar British philosophy is beyond doubt. But as the authors note, it was the war itself, and the many atrocities it engendered, that gave urgent impetus to a new moral philosophy. There are complications along the way. Murdoch, in particular, has a habit of both falling in love and being fallen for. She almost irrevocably damages her friendship with Foot by causing and then breaking a complicated love quadrilateral. Her admiration for Anscombe shades into the erotic. But, in and out of each others’ orbit, they start to find alternative ways of thinking about human beings, drawing on insights from Aristotle, Aquinas and Wittgenstein. Anscombe and Foot develop formidable reputations in academic philosophy. Murdoch’s beautiful, challenging philosophical writing gives way to a career as an acclaimed novelist and woman of letters. Midgley is the most grounded of the quartet, bringing philosophy into conversation with zoology and ethology and publishing the first of her 18 books when she is 59. Spectacularly clever . . . Cozy and yet cosmic, Metaphysical Animals is a great choice for amateur philosophers and appreciators of well-written, history-making accounts alike.”A few weeks ago I finished reading The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb & found it an excellent book. This is yet another excellent book about four female philosophers who “set to work on an account of human life, action & perception that could reconnect morality with what really matters.” And what did Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch & Philippa Foot think really matters? Seeing the everyday reality of our world, of people’s lives, “as something astonishing & fragile & in need of constant care & attention.” It is not a world where moral language is reduced to dictionary definitions, but where language is woven “together to create living patterns of significance & sense.” The authors spend some time discussing Susan Stebbings-should have been longer- and Freddie Ayer, and his soul-destroying positivism. Absorbing. . .each of this book’s subjects produced work that, in seeking to reconnect ‘human life, action and perception’ with morality, remains vitally relevant.”

There are a couple of prominent themes in the book. The first is the fact that they were all women. This is why I decided to read it and how the book is marketed. It's certainly covered although not extensively. Nevertheless, it's very true that at the time it was a world of men, and philosophy, in particular, was heavily biased against women. A funny example is Elizabeth’s first lecture, which she gave in trousers. It became a huge controversy at the time, requiring an official statement by the clerk that she needed to become "appropriately dressed", meaning a skirt. She ended up managing a compromise where she would go to school in her trousers, but change to a skirt in a changing room before going to lecture. There are many other examples where women were clearly not taken seriously just because of their gender, and overall barriers to being part of philosophy. If you want to know what colour of silk cushions and bedspread Foot had in her rooms near Somerville College, then this is the book to read. Similarly, if your thing is the extended social connections of the Oxford intelligentsia, it’s a handy resource. But the general reader interested in the subject may wish that it devoted the same care to dealing with philosophical definitions, or where Wittgenstein stood in relation to the debates around logical positivism, as it does in bringing to life the rarefied milieu of Boars Hill.Metaphysical Animals is both story and argument. The story is a fine one. Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley were students at Oxford during the second world war. They found a world in which many of the men were absent. Those who remained were either too old or too principled to fight. It was a world, as Midgley later put it, where women’s voices could be heard.