Philosophy

Mary Midgley

1919–2018 · British

Moral philosophy; philosophy of biology; animal ethics

Mary Midgley was a moral philosopher who published her first book at fifty-nine and then wrote for forty more years, mostly against what she saw as the overreach of science into questions it cannot answer. She insisted that human beings are animals with a real nature, attacked the reduction of biology to selfish genes, and argued that science runs on myths and images as much as on data. One of the Oxford wartime generation of women philosophers, she spent her working life at Newcastle and became a much-loved public scourge of scientific pretension.

How to spot them

▸The scourge of scientific overreach; her savage 1979 review of The Selfish Gene
▸Philosophy as plumbing — hidden pipework you only notice when it leaks
▸First book published at 59; last book published at 98, weeks before her death
▸One of the Oxford 'wartime quartet' of women philosophers alongside Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch
▸Newcastle upon Tyne; Gifford Lecturer 1989–90; animals, myths and human nature

Key works

A 1978 first book, written when its author was fifty-nine, arguing that we are animals with a real nature rather than blank slates or angels stuck in flesh (1978)

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature — her debut, and the root of everything that followed.

A 1983 book on the moral standing of non-human creatures, against the idea that only parties to a social contract can be owed anything (1983)

Animals and Why They Matter.

A 1984 philosophical essay refusing to treat evil as a positive force, finding it instead in the narrowing and failure of ordinary human motives (1984)

Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay.

A 1985 polemic against the habit of turning natural selection into a creed with salvation, prophets and an escape from the body (1985)

Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears.

Her 1989–90 Gifford Lectures, on the quasi-religious dreams of immortality and cosmic escape smuggled into popular science writing (1992)

Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning — the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, published in 1992.

A 2003 book arguing that thought depends on pictures — the machine, the contract, the lone competitor — and that unexamined imagery does the real work (2003)

The Myths We Live By.

A short final book published in 2018, weeks before her death at 99, defending the discipline against the claim that science has made it redundant (2018)

What Is Philosophy For? — she corrected the proofs in her last months.

Key ideas

Philosophy is like plumbing: a hidden system of concepts that nobody thinks about until something starts to smell, at which point someone has to lift the floorboards
Humans are not blank slates: we have an evolved nature, and admitting it is the beginning of ethics rather than the end of it
Reductionism is the real target — 'nothing-buttery', the claim that we are nothing but genes, or neurons, or selfish machines
Science is not myth-free: it works through images (the selfish gene, the clockwork universe, the war of all against all) that need philosophical inspection
Animals matter morally because our social bonds already extend beyond the species boundary, not because they can sign a contract

Quick-fire facts

•Born Mary Scrutton in London on 13 September 1919; read Greats at Somerville College, Oxford
•Studied at Oxford when most male undergraduates had gone to war, alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch — often called the 'wartime quartet'
•Returned to Oxford to research in 1947 but never finished her thesis, finding her interests 'so unfashionable'
•Moved to Newcastle in 1962 and taught philosophy there for the rest of her career; her husband Geoffrey Midgley was also a philosopher at Newcastle
•Her 1979 article 'Gene-Juggling' in the journal Philosophy attacked Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene so fiercely that she later apologised for the tone, not the substance
•Delivered the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1989–90, published as Science as Salvation
•In 2011 she was the first winner of the Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity
•A Guardian interviewer called her 'the most frightening philosopher in the country: the one before whom it is least pleasant to appear a fool'
•She published roughly a book every two years from the age of 59 until her death at 99

Drill it — 7 cards

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Sources

The Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh — Mary Midgley — Gifford Lectures
Mary Midgley — Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature