History & Criticism
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Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A vibrant portrait of four college friends-Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley-who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away fighting World War II.
The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. 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. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war's darkest revelations.
Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt. Their answer was to bring philosophy back to life. We are metaphysical animals, they realized, creatures that can question their very being. Who am I? What is freedom? What is human goodness? The answers we give, they believed, shape what we will become.
Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a lively portrait of women who shared ideas, but also apartments, clothes and even lovers. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman show how from the disorder and despair of the war, four brilliant friends created a way of ethical thinking that is there for us today.
The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. 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. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war's darkest revelations.
Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt. Their answer was to bring philosophy back to life. We are metaphysical animals, they realized, creatures that can question their very being. Who am I? What is freedom? What is human goodness? The answers we give, they believed, shape what we will become.
Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a lively portrait of women who shared ideas, but also apartments, clothes and even lovers. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman show how from the disorder and despair of the war, four brilliant friends created a way of ethical thinking that is there for us today.
Editorial Reviews
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker
"Evocative and sparkling"
--Editor's Choice, The New York Times Book Review
"Absorbing. . . each of this book's subjects produced work that, in seeking to reconnect 'human life, action and perception' with morality, remains vitally relevant."
--The New Yorker
"Meticulously researched, Metaphysical Animals paints a vivid portrait of the friendship between four remarkable female philosophers."
--The Wall Street Journal
"Metaphysical Animals makes impressively light-footed work of bringing philosophy in. The reader feels as if in the midst of a lively discussion over crumpets at a Lyons tearoom . . . The payoff is four glorious heroines, confident and curious, focused on the world and not themselves."
--The Spectator (U.K.)
"Lively . . . This fascinating work of historico-logico-feminism shows . . . how women fought their way on to the world stage of philosophy and turned its spotlight away from an analytical desert on to what was really important - moral clarity, wisdom and truth."
--Sunday Times (U.K.)
"Irresistible. . . Highly evocative . . . Bring[s] to life an important episode in intellectual history, and [has] made me again grateful that I was for a time a contemporary of these unforgettable women."
--London Review of Books
"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 . . . To read this story is to be reminded . . . that the life of the mind can be as intense and eventful as friendship itself."
--Guardian (U.K.)
"Dishy and intimate, you'll feel as if you've been invi...
"Evocative and sparkling"
--Editor's Choice, The New York Times Book Review
"Absorbing. . . each of this book's subjects produced work that, in seeking to reconnect 'human life, action and perception' with morality, remains vitally relevant."
--The New Yorker
"Meticulously researched, Metaphysical Animals paints a vivid portrait of the friendship between four remarkable female philosophers."
--The Wall Street Journal
"Metaphysical Animals makes impressively light-footed work of bringing philosophy in. The reader feels as if in the midst of a lively discussion over crumpets at a Lyons tearoom . . . The payoff is four glorious heroines, confident and curious, focused on the world and not themselves."
--The Spectator (U.K.)
"Lively . . . This fascinating work of historico-logico-feminism shows . . . how women fought their way on to the world stage of philosophy and turned its spotlight away from an analytical desert on to what was really important - moral clarity, wisdom and truth."
--Sunday Times (U.K.)
"Irresistible. . . Highly evocative . . . Bring[s] to life an important episode in intellectual history, and [has] made me again grateful that I was for a time a contemporary of these unforgettable women."
--London Review of Books
"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 . . . To read this story is to be reminded . . . that the life of the mind can be as intense and eventful as friendship itself."
--Guardian (U.K.)
"Dishy and intimate, you'll feel as if you've been invi...
Readers Top Reviews
History nutHector R.
What this four woman biography proves is how difficult their philosophical project was to achieve. Adding the narrative of the first half of their long lives doesn't add to our understanding of this project and its difficulties.
Green
This book does well at explaining how four women at Oxford brought metaphysics back to life in modern philosophy during an immediately after the Second World War.
Michael T. Bee
Reading "Metaphysical Animals". The book deserves a great deal of praise. In the preface the authors layout their belief that we have lost our way from ideals and guiding concepts ("metaphysics") and that the a return to these is needed. The book offers a wonderful peak into the lives of four women at Oxford during the second world war and after. It makes for a good story also invites you to think and experience some of these same things for yourself. They are clever(brilliant) women. Learning classic philosophy by rubbing shoulders with clever(brilliant) teachers and tutors- Witgenstein, C.S. Lewis, a host of brilliant German that fled Europe from fascism. Highly recommend.
Jon G. Allen
Feminist philosophy has burgeoned in recent decades and includes a monumental contribution to ethical-moral thought that draws from ancient philosophy. The subtitle, How four women brought philosophy back to life, splendidly identifies the tale. Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman brilliantly weave together richly detailed accounts of the lives and relationships of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. In turn, the authors interweave these lives with the modern history of philosophy and their contributions to it. One of their male philosophical foes, Richard Hare, provided a pithy summary of a main theme of contemporary feminist moral philosophy: "[T]hey all, when I am the target, accuse me of paying too much attention to general principles and too little to the peculiarities of individual cases" (p. 283). In the 1970s and 80s, Carol Gilligan discovered that this difference is the crux of what distinguished the hitherto neglected ways of thinking of girls and women from those of their male counterparts who had been viewed as models of mature moral thought. At Oxford during the war and post-war years, the women who broke into teaching were, ironically, teaching philosophy written by men. Now feminist philosophers are teaching what other women have been writing. There are men who played important supporting roles in the development and promotion of these four women's thinking, and one hero stands out: A bonus in this book is a remarkable elucidation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's thinking about language in relation to the texture of human social life. What if philosophy concerned itself with what matters most? It does, as these four women's lives and the authors who embraced them attest.
Daniel Putman
For those interested in the history of philosophy most of this book is as interesting and engaging as anything on the market. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman tie the early lives of Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch and Midgley into the development of philosophy in mid-20th century England. This is especially true of the enduring influence of Wittgenstein on them. I recently read Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein but this book throws a light on Wittgenstein’s intellectual relationship with the four women that is unknown to most of the public including most philosophers. This is most true of Elizabeth Anscombe whose translation of Philosophical Investigations helped to make this book a classic of 20th century philosophy. All four developed original and lasting contributions to philosophy and this book is superb at showing the intellectual development of each of them. Besides the specific philosophical issues Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman do an excellent job of showing the personal interrelationship of the four friends. The book gives the reader fresh insight into the life of a woman in the institutional sexism of major British universities in the mid-20th century. It shows how the four women supported, nourished, and often critiqued each other. Despite going in different directions as they got older, their influence on each other was foundational for their future careers. 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. The book is a unique and compelling document for those who know only the slim outlines of these women’s lives and works. I did not agree with every aspect of the book. I did not find the Truman honorary degree story that bookends the text particularly helpful though it was a significant event in Elizabeth Anscombe’s life. Also, after the first fifty pages or so I wondered how deeply this book about four philosophers could go without skimming the surface. But these turned into minor issues. The vast bulk of this book is an enlightening and (for a philosopher) page-turning story of four remarkable women and how they interacted with each other and the philosophical environment in which they lived. I recommend it in the highest degree.
Short Excerpt Teaser
CHAPTER 1
On Probation
Oxford
October 1938–September 1939
Miss Mary Scrutton & Miss Iris Murdoch of Somerville College
Early in her schooldays Mary Scrutton had an experience of seeing pure sense data. It happened like this. ‘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.' As she looked in wonder, the triangles began to move and turn blue at the edges. Finally, things began to reassemble. The white patches were not tiny sensory objects, fragments of private experience, but small pieces of the plaster ceiling, gently shattering as they tapped her on the head on their downward flight into the bath. Later, when she started studying philosophy, she remembered this scene, in which she had experienced pure colour and shape. Is it possible that the stable world of baths and ceilings can be assembled out of such ephemeral fragments? she wondered. Are baths and ceilings no more than constellations of appearances? Mary was thinking thoughts that had troubled the mind of the ancient philosopher Protagoras, on an island in the Aegean Sea, 450 years before the birth of Christ.
Now, in the mild, breezy autumn of 1938, she was on Oxford's busy Woodstock Road, facing the arched entrance of Somerville College, her back to the low morning sun and a pair of perfectly circular glasses perched high on her nose. As she stepped through, her childhood folded silently behind her: the garden walls of her girlhood home, a rectory in Greenford in Middlesex with its chestnut and ilex trees; her teenage bedroom, book-strewn, in the new house in Kingston-upon-Thames; herself and her mother, Lesley, smiling in matching chinoiserie dresses; an impractically shaped dachshund singing by the gramophone; her father's car, the starting-handle of which was kept not by the bonnet but by the driver's seat so he didn't have to run around to the side in the rain before leaping in when the engine started. Her hair may have been temporarily in an adult roll, but more often it was braided like a Girl Guide's. As a child, she preferred collecting newts to dolls, whose stiff perms when replicated in living women unnerved her. She vigorously resisted her mother's attempts to put her hair in a Marcel wave – ‘it's far too stiff. I don't believe in it.' At nearly six foot, she could not see a way to be ‘dainty'. Her shoelaces were often undone, broken or replaced with string. She was more likely to find a fountain pen leaking in her pocket than a glove or compact, or anything betokening a grown-up female life. Mary took some pride in her ability – which she retained – to be vaguely exasperating to her peers and elders. A letter from her father pointed the way forward: ‘The great thing is, to clear one's mind and REFUSE TO ACCEPT OUTWORN PRESUPPOSITIONS. Form a picture of mankind as it should be and think out the path to that state.'
By the time Mary stood at Somerville Lodge, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had declared ‘peace for our time'; but trenches were already being dug in London parks. Most could see that Europe was now heading inexorably towards a second war. Many of the young men who found themselves, as Mary did, at the gates of Oxford colleges and on the threshold of adulthood, did not expect to finish their degrees.
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. But her Austrian adventure had been cut short: she had arrived in the capital a fortnight before the country ceased to exist. Mary's teacher, Jean Rowntree (granddaughter of the Quaker philanthropist, Joseph Rowntree), had reassured her concerned parents that it would be safe and that any dangers posed by fascism would be balanced by improvements in Mary's German. 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. But on 12 March, Mary watched from the window as Nazis marched through the city, lacing the Ringstrasse lamp posts with swastikas sewn on to billowing red banners. Blonde German girls handed out flowers and beamed as Jewish shops were ransacked and their owners rounded up. Professor Jerusalem, Mary's Jewish host, was among those arrested, and Mary picked her way through the broken glass on the pavement to join a frantic queue at the Quaker meeting house, hoping the Society of Friends could help. They couldn't – Professor Jerusalem was an Austrian citizen – and she cried all the way through the interview.
Ma...
On Probation
Oxford
October 1938–September 1939
Miss Mary Scrutton & Miss Iris Murdoch of Somerville College
Early in her schooldays Mary Scrutton had an experience of seeing pure sense data. It happened like this. ‘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.' As she looked in wonder, the triangles began to move and turn blue at the edges. Finally, things began to reassemble. The white patches were not tiny sensory objects, fragments of private experience, but small pieces of the plaster ceiling, gently shattering as they tapped her on the head on their downward flight into the bath. Later, when she started studying philosophy, she remembered this scene, in which she had experienced pure colour and shape. Is it possible that the stable world of baths and ceilings can be assembled out of such ephemeral fragments? she wondered. Are baths and ceilings no more than constellations of appearances? Mary was thinking thoughts that had troubled the mind of the ancient philosopher Protagoras, on an island in the Aegean Sea, 450 years before the birth of Christ.
Now, in the mild, breezy autumn of 1938, she was on Oxford's busy Woodstock Road, facing the arched entrance of Somerville College, her back to the low morning sun and a pair of perfectly circular glasses perched high on her nose. As she stepped through, her childhood folded silently behind her: the garden walls of her girlhood home, a rectory in Greenford in Middlesex with its chestnut and ilex trees; her teenage bedroom, book-strewn, in the new house in Kingston-upon-Thames; herself and her mother, Lesley, smiling in matching chinoiserie dresses; an impractically shaped dachshund singing by the gramophone; her father's car, the starting-handle of which was kept not by the bonnet but by the driver's seat so he didn't have to run around to the side in the rain before leaping in when the engine started. Her hair may have been temporarily in an adult roll, but more often it was braided like a Girl Guide's. As a child, she preferred collecting newts to dolls, whose stiff perms when replicated in living women unnerved her. She vigorously resisted her mother's attempts to put her hair in a Marcel wave – ‘it's far too stiff. I don't believe in it.' At nearly six foot, she could not see a way to be ‘dainty'. Her shoelaces were often undone, broken or replaced with string. She was more likely to find a fountain pen leaking in her pocket than a glove or compact, or anything betokening a grown-up female life. Mary took some pride in her ability – which she retained – to be vaguely exasperating to her peers and elders. A letter from her father pointed the way forward: ‘The great thing is, to clear one's mind and REFUSE TO ACCEPT OUTWORN PRESUPPOSITIONS. Form a picture of mankind as it should be and think out the path to that state.'
By the time Mary stood at Somerville Lodge, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had declared ‘peace for our time'; but trenches were already being dug in London parks. Most could see that Europe was now heading inexorably towards a second war. Many of the young men who found themselves, as Mary did, at the gates of Oxford colleges and on the threshold of adulthood, did not expect to finish their degrees.
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. But her Austrian adventure had been cut short: she had arrived in the capital a fortnight before the country ceased to exist. Mary's teacher, Jean Rowntree (granddaughter of the Quaker philanthropist, Joseph Rowntree), had reassured her concerned parents that it would be safe and that any dangers posed by fascism would be balanced by improvements in Mary's German. 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. But on 12 March, Mary watched from the window as Nazis marched through the city, lacing the Ringstrasse lamp posts with swastikas sewn on to billowing red banners. Blonde German girls handed out flowers and beamed as Jewish shops were ransacked and their owners rounded up. Professor Jerusalem, Mary's Jewish host, was among those arrested, and Mary picked her way through the broken glass on the pavement to join a frantic queue at the Quaker meeting house, hoping the Society of Friends could help. They couldn't – Professor Jerusalem was an Austrian citizen – and she cried all the way through the interview.
Ma...
