Similarly, if your thing is the extended social connections of the Oxford intelligentsia, it’s a handy resource. If you want to know what colour of silk cushions and bedspread Foot had in her rooms near Somerville College, then this is the book to read. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman do attempt to explain how they did this, but too often the arguments are lost under a welter of descriptions of daily life in Oxford, with all its strange academic rituals, arcane language and general sense of inwardness, as well a great deal of incidental detail. The four women all committed to establishing themselves as philosophers, and sought to refute Ayer and his ilk. Suddenly metaphysics was back in fashion, or at least no longer frowned upon. Fortunately for them, if not for the world, the second world war intervened in their studies, removing Ayer and his acolytes from Oxford, and bringing a large influx of European émigré philosophers. It also rendered much of moral philosophy as little more than an expression of emotional preferences.Īnscombe, Murdoch, Midgley and Foot were not fans of logical positivism dogmatism or conclusions. In a sense, it sought to rid philosophy of metaphysics, those abstract questions of being and knowing that students have traditionally liked to explore late at night after one too many stimulants. Ayer was the chief promoter of logical positivism, a school of thought that aimed to clean up philosophy by ruling out large areas of the field as unverifiable and therefore not fit for logical discussion. In the late 1930s, British philosophy, at least at Oxford, was dominated by AJ Ayer, whose groundbreaking book Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936. The quartet in question are Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot, all of whom studied philosophy at Oxford in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It’s really tied together by its subtitle: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. Metaphysical Animals lacks the narrative discipline of Witt genstein’s Poker, and as a result is a baggier and less clearly defined book. The trick in this kind of work is to be able to move from scene-setting to difficult intellectual questions without losing the reader.
In the late 1930s, British philosophy, at least at Oxford, was dominated by AJ Ayer By focusing on a disputed encounter of just a few minutes, Edmonds and Eidinow gave themselves a tight structure that offered a tidy means of exploring deeper questions of philosophy.
The big difference is that it looks at four philosophers, all of whom are women, and it is spread out over a number of years.
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