Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, "Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life" (Doubleday, 2022)
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What questions about the proper concerns of philosophers frame the book?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Talese, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Claire McCool, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Durham University, and Rachel Wiseman, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. We're talking about their new book, Metaphysical Animals, How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, which is just out from Chateau and Windus.
What are the proper things for a philosopher to worry about? And who should be able to worry about them? These two questions, raised in the context of the disruptions and horrors of World War II, animate metaphysical animals. The book interweaves the biographies and philosophies of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philip Afoot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch, who met as students at Oxford as World War II left the old men, refugees, women, and conscientious objectors behind to bloom intellectually while most of the men were away. Each, in her own way, argued for a view of human life as necessarily concerned with metaphysical issues and moral approaches that the then ascendant logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy tried to dismiss as mere nonsense.
McCool and Wiseman bring Anscombe, Foote, Midgley, and Murdoch to life in this highly readable account, sparked by a series of interviews with the elderly Midgley as the last survivor of the group. Let's turn to the interview. Hello. Claire McCool and Rachel Wiseman, welcome to New Books and Philosophy. And I'm very delighted to talk about your new jointly authored book, Metaphysical Animals, How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. So this is a bit of a departure from many of our usual interviews and that it's, you And it's essentially a biography, history, philosophical analysis of four different people and how they together kind of grew up philosophically and responded to the various trends in philosophy and in life in general.
that were going on before, after, and during World War II. So before we get into the book itself and looking at the four different women philosophers, tell us about your interests in bringing them together and the genesis of the book itself.
Okay. Hi, Carrie. This is Rachel here. So my background as a philosopher is in the work of Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe. And I guess in 2016 or something or 2015, I'd written a book on Elizabeth Anscombe's intention. And I was starting to think about my next project. And around about that time, Claire and I met and we came across sort of as part of our friendship. Claire was on maternity leave and I was visiting her and we were talking about. we kind of discovered by accident just the mere fact of these four women, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foote and Mary Midgley being at Oxford as contemporaries during the Second World War. We discovered that because there was a letter that Mary Midgley had written to the Guardian in which she said that the reason that those four women had all gone on to be victims
philosophers and well-known philosophers in a context in which there's hardly any women philosophers was because of the Second World War and the fact that the war had come along when they'd been just starting off in their philosophical lives. And Clara and I were just talking about how completely intriguing this was because both of us as women starting off in philosophy was sort of starting to worry about what our futures were and how to encourage young women coming into the discipline. And I sort of said to Claire, oh, when I retire, I'm going to write a book about these four women. And then Claire will take up
the
story.
Well, I said, no, why don't we, you know, why don't we look into this now?
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What questions about the proper concerns of philosophers frame the book?
0:01–10:35
2
How did the authors discover the four women philosophers and decide to write the book?
10:35–24:55
3
What role did World War II play in giving these women a philosophical voice?
24:55–38:56
4
How did the personal biographies of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch shape their philosophical projects?
38:56–52:37
5
What was the significance of the friendship and collaboration among the four women?
52:37–1:05:17
6
How do the women’s ideas challenge the anti‑metaphysical stance of logical positivism and ordinary‑language philosophy?
1:05:17–1:05:25
Speakers
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