Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

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From the point of view of a person from India, a country that was colonised by the British, it all seems quite self - indulgent. The writing is very readable containing a beautifully light and humorous air to it and the authors have a great facility to explain complex philosophical ideas in a most accessible way. Thus, Mary Midgley’s lost cause against Richard Dawkins received no mention in ‘Metaphysical Animals’. In the late 1930s the women’s colleges at Oxford were but a marginal appendage to the University, very much as the Somerville alumna Dorothy Sayer describes in Gaudy Night.

Later, when she started studying philosophy, she remembered this scene, in which she had experienced pure colour and shape.For those interested in the history of philosophy most of this book is as interesting and engaging as anything on the market.

It's a well-edited piece, it’s also quite dense, and there were times when the detail was a little overwhelming. Elizabeth Anscombe goes to the zoo with Wittgenstein and talks about a drawing of hares and a turned duckface.

Suddenly older lecturers interested in metaphysical issues came back to the fore, and female students once cowed into silence by crowds of arrogant, young men, had space to explore their own concerns and develop their own approaches. Mary had been excited at her election to Form Captain, until she discovered it was part of the ‘Tidier Scrutton Campaign’, launched after the loss of a bicycle, music case, three screw-pencils, a badminton racket and the Book of Judges roused her classmates to action. Iris Murdoch learns that she would draw the face of someone she had not recognized for a second differently before and after the moment of recognizing. As the authors state, on the heels of a pandemic, ‘it is perhaps time to ask again, as these women did after the Second World War: What sort of animal is a human being?