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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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Elizabeth Anscombe broke any number of glass ceilings at Oxford, both as students and later as instructors, and they spurred one another on to greater heights along the way. An approach possibly forgivable in a book of the 1920s but not one of today, and trust me I am no libertarian or moralist. By highlighting in very accessible detail a colorful array of the women's philosophical positions, speeches, attacks, and defenses.

Forget the rudeness; it’s unkind to readers to have to do mental calculations to figure out who they’re talking about. 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. Despite going in different directions as they got older, their influence on each other was foundational for their future careers. Further, whilst the book is understandably focused on how the four thinkers as outstanding female philosophers influenced each other, readers are offered only the most sparing information about how their thought was also affected by the various men in their intellectual circle.Mary Midgley argues that philosophy is as crucial to good life, as plumbers are to having a good sink. Reports of the atrocities of Nazi death camps as well as the use of atomic bombs against Japan further galvanized the four women to find an objective basis for saying why such actions are wrong.

All four developed original and lasting contributions to philosophy and this book is superb at showing the intellectual development of each of them.

It tells the story of the philosophical friendship between Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch.

Murdoch is already well-known as a novelist and as the subject of a Hollywood biopic starring Kate Winslet and Judi Dench. I will make no attempt to critique this issue of naming from a feminist perspective and I can only assume the authors’ intention is to further humanize these women (although Ludwig’s personal life is discussed just as much as his philosophy as well…One could argue he is better known by his last name than his first so it is meant to be clear, but this is just as true for Murdoch, Midgley, Anscombe, and Foot, as well as *cough cough* Jean-Jacques? Jean had spent a sabbatical term in Vienna in 1935, working alongside other Quakers to assist fleeing civilians, and was shortly off to Prague to do the same there, so she knew more than most about the situation in Europe.

Besides the specific philosophical issues Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman do an excellent job of showing the personal interrelationship of the four friends.



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