Citation: Mac Cumhaill, Clare and Rachael Wiseman. “Metaphysical Animals: The four women who transformed 20th-century analytic philosophy.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 April 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/metaphysical-animals.
Image: “Books 6” by ~Brenda-Starr~ is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In this essay adapted from their book of the same title, 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.
Jess commissioned and edited this piece during her time as an associate editor at the Chronicle.