| Iris Murdoch |
Abstract
Analytic philosophy is associated with a line of founding fathers. Also prominent in its history are the philosophical schools and movements that grew up around its dominant male figures.
| Iris Murdoch |
Ideas are a little submerged by biography – and soft furnishings – in this account of how Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot sought to refute logical positivism in wartime Oxford
Few people read books about philosophy nowadays, if they ever did, but there is a larger audience for books about philosophers. One of the more successful examples in this flourishing genre was David Edmonds’s and John Eidinow’s Wittgenstein’s Poker, published in 2001, which examined a brief and tense meeting between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper that took place in Cambridge in 1946.
| Iris Murdoch |
How Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley arrived at a radically new philosophical approach
Aniel Gomes
Thursday 10 February 2022
Metaphysical Animals is both story and argument. The story is a fine one. Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley were students at Oxford during the second world war. They found a world in which many of the men were absent. Those who remained were either too old or too principled to fight. It was a world, as Midgley later put it, where women’s voices could be heard.