Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

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I have never read a book like this – the story of four individuals, each creative and original in her own way, and how their personal and intellectual lives intertwined. 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.

Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman mix biography and anecdote – the Oxford paper that jokingly recommended carrying a white pekingese during blackouts - with elements of philosophy and history, much of which I found entertaining, thought-provoking or gripping. 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. She was a product of Downe House, a school that had begun life in Charles Darwin’s home before moving to The Cloisters, the former home of a female religious community in Berkshire. War also made certain ways of thinking more pressing, including the rights and wrongs of human actions – individually and collectively. 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.Feminist philosophy has burgeoned in recent decades and includes a monumental contribution to ethical-moral thought that draws from ancient philosophy. The decor of this story is WOII Oxford, emptied of men, but full of academic and non-academic refugees, fear, insecurity and letters about the death of brothers, friends and lovers.

Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which they would read in Greek, would be their main diet. In conclusion, the book would have benefited from more psychological depth to better understand its subjects' personalities and motivations. Mary may have dodged past Iris in Mrs Z’s hallway that summer, belongings and shoelaces trailing, head buzzing with Greek declensions.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? Besides the specific philosophical issues Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman do an excellent job of showing the personal interrelationship of the four friends. 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. Despite Prue’s scepticism, the unusual method proved so successful that she feared that in her dying moments she would find Goodwin’s ‘Greek Moods and Tenses’ marching through her head.

You may think that it doesn’t matter if you do something a little wild, but I can tell you that it will.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.

I hated the references to Ayer as Freddie, but almost threw the book against the wall when they referred to Kant as Immanuel. The narrative is of four brilliant women finding their voices, opposing received wisdom, and developing an alternative picture of human beings and their place in the world . The fundamental task for an educator was to curate her pupils’ experiences, cultivating impressions that will ‘live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences’.

A fine account of 4 woman philosophers in the 1930s-1950s in Oxford who changed the course of moral philosophy in the 20th Century. 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. 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 light of these events, it was just not good enough to relegate morality to mere subjective, emotional preference, as the logical positivists were doing. Who could tell what new forms of female life were taking shape within the walls of the women’s colleges, and what the effect might be on the world outside?