There are complications along the way. Murdoch, in particular, has a habit of both falling in love and being fallen for. She almost irrevocably damages her friendship with Foot by causing and then breaking a complicated love quadrilateral. Her admiration for Anscombe shades into the erotic. But, in and out of each others’ orbit, they start to find alternative ways of thinking about human beings, drawing on insights from Aristotle, Aquinas and Wittgenstein. Anscombe and Foot develop formidable reputations in academic philosophy. Murdoch’s beautiful, challenging philosophical writing gives way to a career as an acclaimed novelist and woman of letters. Midgley is the most grounded of the quartet, bringing philosophy into conversation with zoology and ethology and publishing the first of her 18 books when she is 59.

Love can motivate us in a way that involves desire, but not self-interest.“ And describing the conversations, Elizabeth, Iris, Mary and Philippa had about Mary Glover‘s paper, “Obligation and value.”It would be wrong to call it religious, though Anscombe, a practising Catholic, speaks seriously about the “divine”. Perhaps it’s nothing more, nor less, than the profound excitement experienced by four young women shaking off the suffocating orthodoxies of male domination. A fine account of 4 woman philosophers in the 1930s-1950s in Oxford who changed the course of moral philosophy in the 20th Century. It is remarkable that this book was published at the same time as another book on the very same topic: The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. (See also my review of that.) The other book had more of a focussed narrative to it. This book had much more detail about the lives and philosophies of these women, so that it frayed the narrative a bit. To me they were both worth reading, but someone with less philosophical and biographical obsession would probably get more out of the other book. This one is deeply researched and overflows with tidbits from unpublished letters and journals--fascinating to me, maybe not to the general reader. 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.

Meticulously researched, Metaphysical Animals paints a vivid portrait of the friendship between four remarkable female philosophers.”

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. 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. In the late 1930s, British philosophy, at least at Oxford, was dominated by AJ Ayer

Engaging. . .Stories that rival in passion and intrigue anything that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels have to offer and contain much to interest specialists as well as general readers.” I loved getting a glimpse of Elizabeth's relationship with Wittgenstein, one of those heroes whose words and ideas I've pored over for decades now, largely through her translations, and felt that the treatment of most everyone — from the leading ladies and philosophical giants to the most fleeting of cameos — was fair, unflinching without resorting to the kind of judgment that is far more present in the assessment of ideas. Similarly, the persistent affirmation of the book's title, the reminder that we humans are animals, too, and our language central to the activity of our lives, felt to me satisfying and right. I have warm feelings about the Vienna Circle because it was a collection of brilliant people who came together at an interesting time and place, but I do think that some of their followers went too far in reducing philosophy to logic and dismissing legitmate questions as "nonsense" in an aggressive and shaming way. The early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was one of the villians, but he repudiated his earlier works and by the time these ladies came around he had gone far enough into new directions that he could be a guide and mentor for them. The four women who are the subject to of this book helped to redirect philosophy into a more humane and interesting direction that recoginized that people are far more than calculating machines. As the title says, we are metaphysical animals, so we cannot be fully understood without considering our spiritual, irrational, social and emotional qualities. Yet such philosophy had no space for meaning or beauty, it treated human life as if it was nothing but a machine and empty of inner life or value. This was the context in which all 4 women were brought up in their philosophical careers, and they all opposed it. The historical progression and philosophical debates between those perspectives are covered in detail, and a big emphasis in covered about Wittgenstein's role, in part because of how he deviated from logical positivism later in his life, but also because he was a good friend of the group and heavily involved.The authors spend some time discussing Susan Stebbings-should have been longer- and Freddie Ayer, and his soul-destroying positivism. Captivating…an illuminating portrait of philosophy…[Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman] succeed splendidly at showing how Anscombe, Midgley, Murdoch, and Foot personified the truism that philosophy is the primal stuff of life.” 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. 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. Metaphysical Animals is a sort of origin story of four female philosophers who met as undergraduates at Oxford in the 1930s: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. The book focuses mainly on the 1930s to the 1950s, following the four from their undergraduate years to the start of their professional careers. The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, 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.