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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As with any good history, there is something eerily prescient in Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman's account of a university educated cultural elite for whom moral discourse had declined to the point of linguistic one-upmanship--and the subsequent need to reconnect with a more robust notion of virtue, human flourishing, and what makes for a good life. 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.

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. uk, a scholarly project that makes the case for analytic philosophy's first all-female philosophical school.

It fell to four women philosophers, each born in the years between 1918 and 1920, to object to this sad state of affairs. 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. This book had much more detail about the lives and philosophies of these women, so that it frayed the narrative a bit. 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.

Stories that rival in passion and intrigue anything that Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels have to offer and contain much to interest specialists as well as general readers. Her perspective was so vastly different from that of the men she worked alongside, and why/how this was the case is then addressed as the authors look back to 1938 and the years following, and the ways in which Anscombe and her friends formulated another way of looking at ethics and morality. She cried so much during her first weeks that one of the older pupils formed the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Iris (SPCI), the sole activity of which was being nice to her. Well, well,’ she said, on hearing of Mary’s scholarship to Somerville, ‘I’d rather lose my reputation as a prophet than my reputation as a coach. This book ends in 1956 with Elizabeth’s protest against Oxford’s awarding an honorary degree to former president Truman.

In their unfashionable view that it is possible, as Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman put it, to 'use [the] language of morals and speak of objective moral truth', and their conviction that human beings are 'social, creative, curious, spiritual' creatures rather than mere 'efficient calculating machines', the four heroines of this book were untimely. I have warm feelings about the Vienna Circle because it was a collection of brilliant people who came together at an interesting time and place, but I do think that some of their followers went too far in reducing philosophy to logic and dismissing legitmate questions as "nonsense" in an aggressive and shaming way.



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