Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Random House Large Print) - Softcover

MAC Cumhaill, Clare; Wiseman, Rachael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593608070 ISBN 13: 9780593608074

Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A delightful group portrait of four college friends—Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley—who formed a new philosophical tradition starting with the ideas, fears, and hopes of women while Oxford's men were away at war

The history of European philosophy is usually formed from the ideas, visions and hopes of men, many of whom lived monastic lives apart from women and children. In the mid-twentieth century, as students at Oxford, Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch launched an alternative.
 
In the 1930's, while the men of their class went to war, these four women dared to question the abstraction of the modern male philosophical tradition, returning instead to questions of virtue and human nature. They did their philosophical work among diapers and babies, in living rooms and teashops, and in a landscape of bombed out buildings, emergency hospitals, and displaced people. Each woman concluded that human life is not a pursuit for an isolated individual, but for a group.
 
Metaphysical Animals is a retelling of modern philosophy that places four women at the center. It is a story of love and war and friendship that offers a new answer to the fundamental question: what do we live for? 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CLARE MAC CUMHAILL (pronounced McCool) is a lecturer in philosophy at Durham University and RACHAEL WISEMAN is a lecturer in philosophy at University of Liverpool. They are co-directors of the In Parenthesis project, devoted to this all-female philosophical school, launched in 2015 (www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk). 

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CHAPTER 1

On Probation

Oxford

October 1938–September 1939

Miss Mary Scrutton & Miss Iris Murdoch of Somerville College

Early in her schooldays Mary Scrutton had an experience of seeing pure sense data. It happened like this. ‘I was bending over a bath, stirring the water before getting into it, when I felt a light tap on the back of my head and the world before me suddenly turned into an expanse of white triangles.’ As she looked in wonder, the triangles began to move and turn blue at the edges. Finally, things began to reassemble. The white patches were not tiny sensory objects, fragments of private experience, but small pieces of the plaster ceiling, gently shattering as they tapped her on the head on their downward flight into the bath. Later, when she started studying philosophy, she remembered this scene, in which she had experienced pure colour and shape. Is it possible that the stable world of baths and ceilings can be assembled out of such ephemeral fragments? she wondered. Are baths and ceilings no more than constellations of appearances? Mary was thinking thoughts that had troubled the mind of the ancient philosopher Protagoras, on an island in the Aegean Sea, 450 years before the birth of Christ.

Now, in the mild, breezy autumn of 1938, she was on Oxford’s busy Woodstock Road, facing the arched entrance of Somerville College, her back to the low morning sun and a pair of perfectly circular glasses perched high on her nose. As she stepped through, her childhood folded silently behind her: the garden walls of her girlhood home, a rectory in Greenford in Middlesex with its chestnut and ilex trees; her teenage bedroom, book-strewn, in the new house in Kingston-upon-Thames; herself and her mother, Lesley, smiling in matching chinoiserie dresses; an impractically shaped dachshund singing by the gramophone; her father’s car, the starting-handle of which was kept not by the bonnet but by the driver’s seat so he didn’t have to run around to the side in the rain before leaping in when the engine started. Her hair may have been temporarily in an adult roll, but more often it was braided like a Girl Guide’s. As a child, she preferred collecting newts to dolls, whose stiff perms when replicated in living women unnerved her. She vigorously resisted her mother’s attempts to put her hair in a Marcel wave – ‘it’s far too stiff. I don’t believe in it.’ At nearly six foot, she could not see a way to be ‘dainty’. Her shoelaces were often undone, broken or replaced with string. She was more likely to find a fountain pen leaking in her pocket than a glove or compact, or anything betokening a grown-up female life. Mary took some pride in her ability – which she retained – to be vaguely exasperating to her peers and elders. A letter from her father pointed the way forward: ‘The great thing is, to clear one’s mind and REFUSE TO ACCEPT OUTWORN PRESUPPOSITIONS. Form a picture of mankind as it should be and think out the path to that state.’

By the time Mary stood at Somerville Lodge, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had declared ‘peace for our time’; but trenches were already being dug in London parks. Most could see that Europe was now heading inexorably towards a second war. Many of the young men who found themselves, as Mary did, at the gates of Oxford colleges and on the threshold of adulthood, did not expect to finish their degrees.

If things had gone to plan, Mary would have arrived at Somerville fresh from Vienna, her German fluent, her conversation studded with casual references to Viennese culture and art. But her Austrian adventure had been cut short: she had arrived in the capital a fortnight before the country ceased to exist. Mary’s teacher, Jean Rowntree (granddaughter of the Quaker philanthropist, Joseph Rowntree), had reassured her concerned parents that it would be safe and that any dangers posed by fascism would be balanced by improvements in Mary’s German. Jean had spent a sabbatical term in Vienna in 1935, working alongside other Quakers to assist fleeing civilians, and was shortly off to Prague to do the same there, so she knew more than most about the situation in Europe. But on 12 March, Mary watched from the window as Nazis marched through the city, lacing the Ringstrasse lamp posts with swastikas sewn on to billowing red banners. Blonde German girls handed out flowers and beamed as Jewish shops were ransacked and their owners rounded up. Professor Jerusalem, Mary’s Jewish host, was among those arrested, and Mary picked her way through the broken glass on the pavement to join a frantic queue at the Quaker meeting house, hoping the Society of Friends could help. They couldn’t – Professor Jerusalem was an Austrian citizen – and she cried all the way through the interview.

Mary returned to England before the month was out, and her hosts were, thankfully, not far behind her. On Professor Jerusalem’s release, he, Frau Jerusalem and their fourteen-year-old daughter Leni managed to escape Austria to join Mary and her family at their home. They would stay with the Scruttons until the following April, when they received permits for a new life in Palestine.

Mary had been offered the Deakin Scholarship (£50 per year, for three years) after a panicked attempt at an entrance exam in Autumn 1937, from which she expected nothing but disaster. 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. The school’s founder and headmistress, Olive Willis, took inspiration from the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The fundamental task for an educator was to curate her pupils’ experiences, cultivating impressions that will ‘live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences’. As the child grows, ‘life-space and life-durations are expanded’, he explained, and a school must lay down a store of experiences that will allow her to navigate this expanding future with well-tempered curiosity. Olive Willis fostered non-autocratic relationships between teacher and student. Young and old were to be real friends. Reform would be gentle. 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. At Downe there were no prizes, no Head Girl and no houses. Tests and competitions were not part of Mary’s childhood. But despite her misgivings about the Somerville examination, her General Paper had impressed.

At the request of the college, Mary had spent the year before going up having coaching in Latin and Greek from Mrs Zvegintzov (formerly Miss Diana Lucas), a tall masterful ex-Somervillian, married to the son of Russian émigrés, to whom the college regularly referred prospective students. Mrs Z’s methods were severe and surprising. Prudence Smith, another Somervillian sent to Mrs Z, complained to her boyfriend: ‘she suggests in all sobriety that I lie in a cold bath . . . and sing the declensions and conjugations’. 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. Mrs Z was astounded by Mary’s ignorance – but also by her success. ‘Well, well,’ she said, on hearing of Mary’s scholarship to Somerville, ‘I’d rather lose my reputation as a prophet than my reputation as a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Large Print
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593608070
• ISBN 13: 9780593608074
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 660
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien