{"id":8599,"date":"2022-02-23T12:16:07","date_gmt":"2022-02-23T12:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8599"},"modified":"2022-03-02T12:09:59","modified_gmt":"2022-03-02T12:09:59","slug":"metaphysical-animals-by-clare-mac-cumhaill-and-rachael-wiseman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8599","title":{"rendered":"Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Chatto & Windus 3 February 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

416pp, hardback, \u00a325.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A quartet of clever twentieth-century British women who brought the narrowing academic discipline of philosophy back to everyday life might not seem the most riveting subject for the general reader. And indeed, there are times when (even to one who studied the same subjects in the same place) this account feels too blithely abstruse.\u00a0 However, the four women in the spotlight are such strong characters, so disarmingly real, and so searching that their chosen subject comes to seem the only one worth arguing about.<\/p>\n

Linked by friendship as well as intellectual ability, sharing flats and sometimes lovers (although destined for sharply contrasting private lives), and driven to ask the same central questions over and over, these women were an example of what can be achieved when good brains join forces and refuse to be shouted down.<\/p>\n

Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe were philosophy students at Oxford during the Second World War, when most male undergraduates, and many tutors, were conscripted, leaving teaching in the hands of refugee scholars, women and conscientious objectors.\u00a0 They began their philosophical studies shortly after Hitler\u2019s troops entered Austria and fought to rescue metaphysics (e.g. what is a good and what is evil?) from nit-picking logic and hair-splitting linguistic analysis. In due course, young Anscombe publicly challenged the university\u2019s decision to award an honorary degree to US President Harry S. Truman, whose name was by then synonymous with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.\u00a0 Notoriously trouser-wearing and chain-smoking, Anscombe went on to become the right-hand woman to philosophy heavyweight Ludwig Wittgenstein, to whose Cambridge Chair she succeeded, while also producing seven children.<\/p>\n

Future novelist Iris Murdoch and future environmental\/animal ethicist Mary Midgely worked in Whitehall after the war, before returning to academe; Philippa Foot, future leading moral philosopher, helped to set up Oxfam. \u00a0Against considerable resistance from powerful academic men who found their preoccupations and values too trivial and domestic, too \u2018feminine\u2019, these four women threw their energies into demanding ferocious attention to what they saw as the real questions of human life.<\/p>\n

The authors, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, were lucky enough to get to know the last survivor of the quartet, Mary Midgley, in her nineties and to hear her first-hand accounts of what she called \u2018The Golden Age of Female Philosophy\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 A measure of the significance of the group – who may have flourished only because of their unique circumstances – is that two biographies have appeared at the same time.\u00a0 The other, published by Oxford University Press, is by American philosopher Benjamin Lipscomb.\u00a0 This one, by two young British female philosophers, is full of passion, colour and insight, as befits their subjects.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe were philosophy students at Oxford during the Second World War, when most male undergraduates, and many tutors, were conscripted, leaving teaching in the hands of refugee scholars, women and conscientious objectors. They began their philosophical studies shortly after Hitler\u2019s troops entered Austria and fought to rescue metaphysics (e.g. what is a good and what is evil?) from nit-picking logic and hair-splitting linguistic analysis […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8599"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8602,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8599\/revisions\/8602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}