Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman
Chatto and Windus, £25, 416 pages
This work is something remarkable; a book by two women philosophers on four women philosophers. The authors, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman, were discontented with their discipline and looking for a new direction; Providence delivered them a 2013 letter to The Guardian by Mary Midgley with the title The Golden Age of Female Philosophy, about the war and the way it removed male philosophers from the Oxford scene, with their logical positivism and their arid focus on language, and allowed women to flourish. The authors were captivated, still more when they found that Mary Midgley was living in a retirement home near them in Newcastle. They made friends. In their conversations, Metaphysical Animals came about. It is a tale of philosophy expressed in the story of four friends: Mary Midgley herself, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe.
