Metaphysical Animals
How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
by Clare Mac Cumhaill; Rachael Wiseman
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Pub Date May 10 2022 | Archive Date May 31 2022
Doubleday Books | Doubleday
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Description
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.
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.
Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a lively portrait of women who shared ideas, but also apartments, clothes and even lovers. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman show how from the disorder and despair of the war, four brilliant friends created a way of ethical thinking that is there for us today.
Advance Praise
“Lively . . . This fascinating work of historico-logico-feminism shows . . . how women fought their way on to the world stage of philosophy and turned its spotlight away from an analytical desert on to what was really important – moral clarity, wisdom and truth.”
–Sunday Times (U.K.)
“Irresistible. . . Highly evocative . . . Bring[s] to life an important episode in intellectual history, and [has] made me again grateful that I was for a time a contemporary of these unforgettable women.”
–London Review of Books
“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 . . . To read this story is to be reminded . . . that the life of the mind can be as intense and eventful as friendship itself.”
–Guardian (U.K.)
“It’s a compelling story, about four brilliant thinkers . . . This is a world where people gossip. This is a world that is — that most criminally unphilosophical of all things perhaps — cozy. . . It might not always be recognizably “philosophical” — but this is the point of the book . . . a masterful argument, made not only by the book’s content, but by its form. Philosophy and life are united, the book seems to be saying: not only by default, but as upbringing; as education. A philosophical life is a life lived with others — however cozy those relationships might be.”
–Gawker
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780385545709 |
| PRICE | $32.50 (USD) |
| PAGES | 416 |
Available on NetGalley
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