They helped to turn the tide back toward considering ethics and metaphysics as legitimate subjects of philsophical inquiry. The school’s founder and headmistress, Olive Willis, took inspiration from the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey.

In a proposal for a BBC show, that did not make it, Mary Midgley argues that currents like solipsism, individualism, and scepticism, that are characteristic for contemporary western philosophy, could never have been developed by people with a real life. Forget the rudeness; it’s unkind to readers to have to do mental calculations to figure out who they’re talking about. Mary may have dodged past Iris in Mrs Z’s hallway that summer, belongings and shoelaces trailing, head buzzing with Greek declensions. Despite Prue’s scepticism, the unusual method proved so successful that she feared that in her dying moments she would find Goodwin’s ‘Greek Moods and Tenses’ marching through her head.What actually brought this book to my attention was a review of it in Philosophy Now Magazine, where the reviewer criticized the authors’ use of first names for the women, but not for the men. Her perspective was so vastly different from that of the men she worked alongside, and why/how this was the case is then addressed as the authors look back to 1938 and the years following, and the ways in which Anscombe and her friends formulated another way of looking at ethics and morality. There is also something to be said about the tone of a piece that refers to the key women with first names, but the men with last names. Elizabeth Anscombe: defiantly brilliant, chain-smoking, trouser-wearing Catholic and (eventual) mother of seven. We see Scrutton and Murdoch meet at Somerville, later joined by Foot, a strange place in which trousers were considered a cause for reprimand but brainy girls were encouraged.

One of the questions it poses, was first raised by Midgley in 1953, what might philosophy be if its history had not been so firmly tied to the visions of men? The authors use as a framing device Oxford's awarding of an honorary degree to Harry Truman in 1956. Her hair may have been temporarily in an adult roll, but more often it was braided like a Girl Guide’s. Mary Midgley I knew nothing of but since discovered she was famous for her own thought experiment where a Japanese Samurai cleaves a haunch off an innocent passerby to test his new sword. As with any good history, there is something eerily prescient in Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s account of a university educated cultural elite for whom moral discourse had declined to the point of linguistic one-upmanship—and the subsequent need to reconnect with a more robust notion of virtue, human flourishing, and what makes for a good life.

The vast bulk of this book is an enlightening and (for a philosopher) page-turning story of four remarkable women and how they interacted with each other and the philosophical environment in which they lived. Is it possible that the stable world of baths and ceilings can be assembled out of such ephemeral fragments? And at times, it portrayed them as scatter-brained willful vagabonds, even Foot for a time, who really have no admirable qualities, certainly not any that one would want to emulate.

By highlighting in very accessible detail a colorful array of the women’s philosophical positions, speeches, attacks, and defenses…[ Metaphysical Animals] makes a much-needed case for the value of philosophy to life as a whole, and for the reader’s own interest in pursuing such a life for oneself…Endlessly readable. She was a product of Downe House, a school that had begun life in Charles Darwin’s home before moving to The Cloisters, the former home of a female religious community in Berkshire. Philippa Foot was the creator of the famous Trolley problem, which I found utterly silly, like most philosophic ‘thought experiments’ (where fat men get stuck in the opening of caves which are about to be flooded or Rawls’ original position behind of veil of ignorance – I think there’s one where you have to shove a fat man in front of a train).A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A vibrant portrait of four college friends—Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley—who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford’s men were away fighting World War II.