Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

"This edifying debut by philosophy professors Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman tells the stories of four female philosophy pioneers: Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Goot, and Iris Murdoch...Through interviews with Midgley and 'fragments from letters, journals, photos, conversations, notebooks, reminiscences and postcard,' the authors detail how these women broke into the male-dominated field of philosophy, beginning with the quartet's time together as Oxford students during WWII and following their intellectual trajectories over the ensuing decades...Though the prose can be dense, the research is thorough and provides a cogent counternarrative to traditional male-centric histories of mid-20th-century philosophy...These four philosophers might not appear on standard syllabi, but this detailed chronicle makes a persuasive case that they should."

"An homage to four women friends whose collegiate lives benefited from the exodus of the generation of British men who traded academic dress for military uniforms during WWII ..."

"the heart of this book resides in the friendship among the four women and the ways they supported and influenced one another ..."

"Wiseman, two British lecturers in philosophy, focus on the 20-year period between 1938 and 1958 and provide a more formidable, granular account of the war years and the development of each woman's ideas."

"Metaphysical Animals is a portrait in intellectual courage."

"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...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...The authors are friends as well as philosophers and the book is both product and expression of that friendship...Its story underwrites its argument: that philosophical insight is not conveyed primarily by words on a page but through a life lived well...Readers will have to tolerate a certain amount of reconstruction, and the use of 'perhaps' to mark transitions from one fact to another...But to read this story is to be reminded of the institutional barriers preventing women from studying philosophy, the grit and determination of those who resolve to do it anyway, and the way that life of the mind can be as intense and eventful as friendship itself."