Enjoy this interview excerpt from Issue No.3 of our journal in celebration of International Women’s Day, where we talk with the authors of Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life.
WHAT IS THE HISTORICAL DISCOURSE OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY SURROUNDING THE ROLE OF THE, UNTIL RECENTLY OVERLOOKED, FOUR WOMEN AT THE CENTRE OF YOUR BOOK ‘METAPHYSICAL ANIMALS’?
RW: One of the things that Clare and I really wanted to do when we started writing about the ‘The Wartime Quartet’– Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot – was to disrupt, or at least complicate, the received story [of the history of analytic philosophy]. One thing you’ll notice is that when you are given a list of who the major figures are in early analytic philosophy, it’s an entirely male lineage: grandfather, father, son… Another is that it is like the Holocaust never happened between Frege and Austin, and you find yourself asking, weren’t there two world wars?
It’s like those disruptions never even happened. So one thing that’s been amazing in putting these four women at the centre of a historical narrative about philosophy in this country is that it means you can’t do that anymore. You have to take really seriously the impact of the war, both on what was going on in the universities, but also on the kinds of questions that people were asking, and the sorts of ways in which people were thinking about what philosophy might be.
CMC: They all met as undergraduates at Oxford between 1937 and 1942. Midgley and Murdoch were really good friends from the off – they were in the same college. A bit later, Murdoch became very close to Foot. They were best friends and then they had some kind of fleeting interactions with Anscombe at various intervals. They were all taught by someone who’s incredibly important for our narrative, called Donald MacKinnon, who was a tutor at Keeble and a conscientious objector.
RW: One of the things that we talked about in the book is how, when the war started, many of the men left to go and join the intelligence services or to fight. So, the scene at Oxford was transformed. The people left around were conscientious objectors, men too old to be conscripted, women, refugee scholars, and people who’d been deemed medically unfit to fight. So there was a completely radical shift in who was getting heard at the university.
Learning about these scholars was another shock of doing the archival work for the book. You have to really understand – and this story hasn’t been properly told yet – that many of these refugee scholars were the biggest names in Europe from the point of view of scholarship.
CMC: What we were surprised to discover when we were researching the book was that there was still quite a strong idealist strand of thinking, still quite prevalent even in the 30s – there’s even some pragmatism. And of course, there’s the older generation of Oxford Realists. But really, there was a whole smorgasbord of different positions you could take up metaphysically, and because you have a tutorial system in Oxford, it very much depended who you get exposed to through the tutorials; that hugely influenced how you were formed and shaped philosophically.
Just before the Quartet arrived in Oxford, Language, Truth and Logic by A.J. Ayer had been published. Ayer re-imagined the philosophy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Vienna Circle so as to make it accessible and attractive to a British audience – and he made it look like a form of neo-Humean empiricism. Its basic message was: metaphysics and moral philosophy are nonsense; the only truths are scientific truths; and the only job for philosophy is the analysis and clarification of language. It was a really popular book when it first came out, both among undergraduates and the public at large, and it was beginning to be talked about among the younger Oxford dons. But Ayer – and those male undergraduates and younger dons – were the ones who disappeared from Oxford when the war started. So the real impact of Language, Truth and Logic on the formation of philosophical discourse in Oxford didn’t really take hold until after the war.
The Wartime Quartet did have some knowledge of Ayer’s text, refracted through Donald MacKinnon. MacKinnon had been part of the male group that were discussing Language, Truth and Logic at the end of the 1930’s, but he was quite sceptical of a lot of its claims. He was worried that logical positivism, as endorsed by Ayer and others, and its rejection of metaphysics, was an assault on the idea of the human. So the Quartet received Ayer through MacKinnon’s critical, sceptical lens. They were also being taught by older men – A. D. Lindsay and R. G. Collingwood and G. R. G. Mure – as well as a number of Jewish refugee scholars.
Learning about these scholars was another shock of doing the archival work for the book. You have to really understand – and this story hasn’t been properly told yet – that many of these refugee scholars were the biggest names in Europe from the point of view of scholarship. Really, Oxford was considered something of a backwater in comparison. But by the time the Quartet began their studies they are all on the streets and in the lecture halls of Oxford. So it’s just astonishing to consider the quality of scholarship that the women were exposed to as undergraduates. It would just have been unheard of prior to the mid-1930s.
[...] these four women were kind of going well, hang on a second… Hasn’t there just been an atom bomb! There’s just been a Holocaust! Surely we need to be able to talk about that!
All that is to say, the Quartet had an education that was very eclectic. People like Donald MacKinnon were telling them bits and pieces about logical positivism, but they were also being taught by all these kind of massive names from the rest of Europe. They were all getting really into Plato and Aristotle, and Elizabeth Anscombe was reading a lot of Aquinas. And obviously their lives were completely transformed by the war. They were already worried about global politics and about the future, and their friends and family were getting killed.
RW: When the men came back from the war in 1945 they seemingly picked up the project that Ayer had started in Language, Truth and Logic – taking off from the thought that metaphysics and moral philosophy are nonsense. And these four women were kind of going well, hang on a second… Hasn’t there just been an atom bomb! There’s just been a Holocaust! Surely we need to be able to talk about that!
[...] one thing that unifies the Quartet is that they had this bracketed time that meant that when the men came back and started saying, ‘oh, philosophy is all about the analysis of language’, they were able to say ‘no – that won’t do’. And so the name of our book, Metaphysical Animals, is connected to the substantive philosophy that emerged between them as a kind of response to the deflationary, linguistic philosophy that was that was going on all around them.
There is an amazing moment when Philippa Foot recalls that although she was actually more interested in philosophy of mind, once she realized that according to the philosophy of Ayer, you couldn’t say to a Nazi that they were objectively wrong – you could only say that they had a different opinion or preferences – she was so horrified that she sort of pivoted to moral philosophy. So one thing that unifies the Quartet is that they had this bracketed time that meant that when the men came back and started saying, ‘oh, philosophy is all about the analysis of language’, they were able to say ‘no – that won’t do’. And so the name of our book, Metaphysical Animals, is connected to the substantive philosophy that emerged between them as a kind of response to the deflationary, linguistic philosophy that was that was going on all around them.
CMC: When Foot wanted to be able to say that what the Nazis did was objectively wrong, she needed to reach for a form of moral realism and she eventually found what she needed in the thought, and fact, that we are animals, and that this entails that our lives have a certain structure; that we have certain kinds of needs in order to live well and flourish. Once you have this notion of an animal at the heart of your moral philosophy, it’s just obvious that there are certain things that are bad for that kind of animal, in that they will prevent that animal’s life from going well. So, the first step is to recognize that we’re animals. But then we’re this specific kind of animal: we’re metaphysical animals who have the capacity to ask “why?”. This is one of the instruments we have that allows us to go beyond our limited perspective, and to create ideas and artefacts – poetry and philosophical theories and so on – that orientate us in space and time.
So we’re animals that have these particular capacities – we’ve got this kind of metaphysical orientation and this kind of creative tendency. But that can also be dangerous to us as animals because we’re able to create pictures and theories and ideas that are ultimately inimical, disorientating, and bad for us. So that’s the kind of the joy and danger of being this kind of creature, one that has this kind of orientation.
RW: There’s this amazing line from Iris Murdoch, where she says – and in a way, this was kind of the beginning of the book for us – “man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble that picture”. So the thought is, we’re a kind of animal but one of the things that we do – and you can think of ‘we’ here as the subject who is doing this as all of us, collectively, culturally if you like, or you can think of it in your own personal case of doing it for yourself – is that we form a self-image of what sort of thing we are and that picture then comes to be something that we grow into. So, it doesn’t just remain an image, but actually we can come to inhabit it such that and then inhabiting it changes our nature.
And so if you have a dominant image of humans as sort of calculating machine – as purely rational unemotional agents, or the kinds of creatures that reason like a decision theorist reasons or like a Utilitarian maximises reasons – then it’s not dangerous just because it’s empirically false, but it’s dangerous because we actually grow to become like that and then that changes the way that we orientate ourselves going forward. So the Quartet have this idea, like Clare says, of this kind of amazing potential we have, but also this great danger in this sort of picture-making metaphysical aspect of our animality.
CMC: And I think that was one of the reasons that we wrote the book as well, we wanted to offer a different kind of picture of what the philosopher looks like or could be like. We wanted there to be a history of philosophy that was something for us to grow into in a way, but also for our students and anyone who resonates with the kind of picture we find in these women’s work. And I guess that’s what you guys are doing as well: we’re trying to make these sorts of totemic objects that we can be attracted to, but that show us a kind of different way of going on in philosophy, in life.
RW: One of the things about the form of the book is that it is a philosophical argument, but we wanted to disguise it as a narrative. So, if you notice the structure of it, it starts with a philosophical problem, which is effectively the trolley problem – should you kill the one to save the many – but actually concretized in a real historical situation. And as you go along through the narrative structure, you’re given the parts of the argument, but disguised as narrative. So we wanted it to be possible to read the book just as a story about these four women, but also for it to be possible for the reader to extract from it the kind of structure of a philosophical argument that you can then check for consistency, and make sure it has all the relevant parts.
WHY IS THERE SO LITTLE HISTORICIZING OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE ANALYTIC TRADITION?
RW: One reason, on the part of the analytic tradition, is that once you’ve got this technical analytic method that you can use to show that everyone – Descartes or Spinoza or whoever – is strictly and literally speaking nonsense, then why would you be interested in what these people had said? If you look at the beginning of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, his central claim is that most of metaphysics is, strictly speaking, nonsense. It’s as though there’s no reason to do the history of philosophy anymore because you’ve got this tool that enables you to show both that it’s nonsense, and to clarify things from the ground up. And it’s this process of clarification that is aiming towards ideal clarity in language – it’s not aiming toward some kind of conversation or discourse with the philosophers of the past.
CMC: I think that part of the reason is also due to a general trend a bit earlier, in the 1920s, when the famous Oxford PPE – Politic, Philosophy and Economics – degree was first offered. Lots of people came back after the First World War, and more people needed to be educated who didn’t have a classical education. What they needed was to be able to do the nuts and bolts stuff because, of course, you still had the British Empire at that time. So there was this need for a kind of managerial class; you didn’t need them to know Latin and Greek and the Classics. But logic was quite helpful. So, I think again, there was a political dimension, and also a focus on, as with English literature for example, close reading rather than thinking about the kind of contextual or historical, social origins of a piece of work because of course, that would be much easier for somebody who’s less well-educated in a traditional sense. And in a way, analysis is a bit like close reading.
[...] the actual historicization of analytic philosophy is a really new thing, and it’s really exciting. I think it’s a really great thing to be doing at the moment because it’s all bound up with really important questions about the canon, about women, about marginalized voices and about the nature of the university. And so, it has a real power in it.
RW: I wonder as well about the idea that philosophy, within Analytic Philosophy, stops thinking of itself as a kind of arts subject and starts thinking as a scientific subject. As is often said, the history of physics isn’t physics – no physicist has to be interested in the history of physics to do physics. And so, there’s that thought as well that the history of philosophy isn’t philosophy, as though we are technicians or scientists of language and that it doesn’t matter what went before, especially on the assumption that it was all nonsense anyway. But even if it wasn’t nonsense, it might be supposed that it wouldn’t really matter in the same way that a particle physicist doesn’t have to know their history, unless they might be interested in their spare time but it’s not crucial to doing a physicist’s job.
CMC: And there is something really exciting about this disinterest in the history as well in a way, because it was really aspirational and very democratic. So, there’s lots of positives. Another thing to mention is the foundation of the League of Nations after the First World War – a forerunner of the United Nations. British philosophers and historians were actually quite involved in that and logic looked like it might have some role to play – not quite like Esperanto – but still as something that could be a tool for internationalization.
RW: I think one other thing – and I would definitely count myself amongst them – is that people who are philosophy lecturers are often really ignorant about history, because to become a professor of philosophy, you’ve got to specialize really early. You’ve got to write a PhD that’s just rigorous argument, and you’ve got to become an expert. My expertise when I got my first permanent job was on whether or not ‘I’ is a referring term – you don’t need to know anything general about culture, or history, to write a doctoral thesis on that. In fact, you don’t have time. You are just kind of funnelled into a specialism. So I think that a lot of people who are teaching philosophy are very narrow; they have very, very deep expertise, but it is very narrow. To expect them to have the kind of overview of the history of not just of the discipline, but of European or global history, that you would really need to be able to do this kind of contextualising work, is something that most people just don’t have, and in a way they can’t because of the way in which the professionalisation of the discipline selects for teachers. And that meant we had to learn a lot of history!
So with all of that being said, the historicization of analytic philosophy is still a relatively recent thing. When I was a student learning the history of analytic philosophy, you read Frege’s papers, you read Wittgenstein’s papers, and you read Russell’s papers. But really that was just the rational reconstructions of the kind of foundational texts of the subject. But the actual historicization of analytic philosophy is a really new thing, and it’s really exciting. I think it’s a really great thing to be doing at the moment because it’s all bound up with really important questions about the canon, about women, about marginalized voices and about the nature of the university. And so, it has a real power in it. There’s so much interesting work happening in that at the moment that is very fresh.
WHAT DO YOU THINK PHILOSOPHY IS TODAY AND WHAT IS IT FUNDAMENTALLY FOR?
CMC: Now philosophy is obviously an academic discipline, and there’s a question of what that is and how that should be practiced but if we think of the metaphysical animal as the animal that asks ‘why?’ in different kinds of registers, I think a number of those registers are philosophical. They’re asking for answers about our place in the world. So the scientific world-view is a kind of philosophy as well, but philosophy is also asking more spiritual sorts of question, asking for how different areas of life connect. And anytime you’re trying to connect things, anytime you’re up against a dilemma, or a paradox, or there’s some kind of resistance to thinking, that’s where philosophy is happening. So it’s really the kind of freedom that comes with human thinking. It’s just a very primitive basic human need and style of thinking. I think this notion of ‘why?’ is really important.
It’s part of what a human being is: to be oriented philosophically. I think this means recognizing that philosophy is a human need in a broader social context, and recognizing this would be a really transformative thing. But obviously that can’t mean that everybody needs to learn formal logic! That would be a challenge!
RW: Another thing that Midgley talks about is how philosophy is seen as a bit like the opera: it’s a nice thing if you’re rich and you’ve got a lot of spare time on your hands, but it’s not for everyday life. Whereas one of the things that she wants to say against this view is that philosophy is more like plumbing, where it is actually that everybody needs philosophy, and everybody is doing philosophy all the time – whether or not they’ve had any training it in it, or whether or not they recognize it. It’s part of what a human being is: to be oriented philosophically. I think this means recognizing that philosophy is a human need in a broader social context, and recognizing this would be a really transformative thing. But obviously that can’t mean that everybody needs to learn formal logic! That would be a challenge!
CMC: Yeah, and recognizing that would require kind of methodological pluralism. And like Rachael said about the idea that philosophy is a human need, we do it all the time; whenever we come up against dilemmas, and ask questions like ‘how should I act?’ or ‘what am I?’. It’s a feature of our being as metaphysical animals. It’s just that some of us are more ‘meta’, if you like, than others.
RW: I completely agree with everything Clare’s just said there! Just thinking about the difference between ‘the philosopher’ as a kind of profession, or as a role within society. This connects one of the other things that Midgley says. She says that if you have a model of language that is historicized – in the way that it is for Wittgenstein and for the Quartet – then you recognize that the concepts that have grown up over time come about in moments of conflict or crisis for human beings, they’ve been formed in at particular socio-cultural moments.
Midgley thinks that’s when you need a technically trained philosopher, with this kind of lawyerly and poetic skill, who can come in, diagnose which of the concepts that are causing the problem [..]
And now we’ve inherited this great hodgepodge of concepts like ‘freedom’ and ‘duty’, and ‘democracy’, and ‘mind’ and ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘love’. All these concepts came about in a particular context, and now we have them at our fingertips. And Midgley says that sometimes these concepts get overinflated, or they stop really working in the context that we’re in now. And when this happens, we’ll start to find our practical rationality is somehow compromised. So, for example, you might find that the concept of ‘freedom’ and the concept of ‘nation’ start to sort of stick with each other, or rub-up against each other and bring you into confusion. And when this starts happening to a lot of us at the same time, it’s not a sort of scientific problem or a technical problem, it’s a problem with our concepts.
Midgley thinks that’s when you need a technically trained philosopher, with this kind of lawyerly and poetic skill, who can come in, diagnose which of the concepts that are causing the problem, why they are causing the problem at the source of that conflict, and then make some kind of creative, poetic move to free us from that by introducing a new concept, or changing the meaning of a concept, or putting a concept in a new context so that suddenly things flow again. Now everybody’s doing this all the time, and sometimes you do need some people who are actually trained to do it because otherwise it will get done badly. So, the need for trained philosophers is, again, like the need for trained plumbers; it’s not because you need people to write very fancy books that nobody can understand, it’s because unless we keep refreshing our concepts, they’ll get stuck in the past, and then we won’t be able to use them.
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE PHILOSOPHY DEVELOP IN ITS PRACTICE IN THE NEAR FUTURE?
RW: One of the things we learned from Mary Midgley is the importance of methodological pluralism. Now we don’t want to say – and she never would have said – that somebody who wants to pursue philosophy in a particular way is doing it wrong. But what is wrong is when everybody is pursuing it in the same way and when there’s some kind of idea that there’s only one standard, or one methodology, within philosophy that we’re all meant to be following.
[...] philosophers need the skills of the lawyer as well as of the poet, and there’s plenty of room for those lawyerly skills of analysis and details in the picking apart of arguments, and we need that, but that can’t be the only thing.
I think there’s a kind of fear for philosophers because they don’t have a real subject matter. They’re not like chemists where there are chemicals being studied. Whereas in philosophy, it’s like, what the hell are we studying? What are we teaching except a particular method? And so, I think there is a fear that if you say there is a myriad of methods, then you’re sort of losing sight of any way of distinguishing good philosophy from bad philosophy; or even that you’re losing sight of Philosophy as a subject. So, I think philosophers should be more confident that there is such a thing as philosophy, and given that confidence, they should be creative and experimental, and try and do it in different ways, and be open to being interested in other ways of pursuing it.
And a lot of that is to do with the sorts of things that you’re doing with Contralytic, by looking for connections with other disciplines. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for the kind of highly analytic, detailed conceptual analysis; like Midgley said, philosophers need the skills of the lawyer as well as of the poet, and there’s plenty of room for those lawyerly skills of analysis and details in the picking apart of arguments, and we need that, but that can’t be the only thing.
CMC: Yeah, I would agree. I would like to see more creativity and openness, and pluralism.
RW: …and women!
CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR CURRENT AND FUTURE PROJECTS?
CMC: We started a project titled Women (-in-Parenthesis) because we just thought: where are the women? At one point during my PhD, I just suddenly thought… Wait, I have barely seen one woman professor. And it’s shocking to recount now. I think on Rachael’s undergraduate syllabus, there was not one woman cited on the reading list for three years. So that’s why we set up Women(-in-Parenthesis): we wanted to bring these four women philosophers out of the footnotes (and the parentheses), and make them the centre of the philosophical story. We hoped that by doing so we’d also create an image of philosophy and philosophical life – especially philosophical friendship – that would encourage young women to see a future for themselves in the discipline.
[...] we wanted young women to read it and be like ‘I want to be a philosopher!
But I think that we’ve seen some massive changes since then. And from when we did our PhD to now, there’s really been a lot of improvement, but there’s a lot more work to do – a lot more. We’ve also got a network called Mapping the Quartet, which anyone can join. It’s for researchers interested in the Quartet, or any of the kind of figures adjacent to the Quartet, or the history of analytic philosophy more broadly. We’ve got quite a big network now that’s very intergenerational as well. It’s just so valuable to have that intergenerational exchange; this was one of the things that we came to appreciate when working with Mary Midgley when she was in her 90’s. So, Mapping the Quartet is definitely a live concern, and Women(-in-Parenthesis) is going still and has sort of enlarged a bit now to include more figures, such as Dorothy Emmett. And we’re just continuing our collaborations together since the publication of Metaphysical Animals.
RW: Yeah, in a way, Metaphysical Animals was sort of an experiment for us in form, where we tried writing a philosophical biography, and tried to embed the metaphysics in the narrative because we wanted it to be read by people who hadn’t and who weren’t studying philosophy – we wanted young women to read it and be like ‘I want to be a philosopher!’. And so, then we had to kind of use the narrative as the form for the philosophy. Whereas now we’re interested in kind of getting the metaphysics out and giving it pure and undiluted. So we’re going to keep working together.
To view the full interview and more, you can order a copy of Issue No.3 of our Interdisciplinary Philosophy Journal from our online shop, or one of our many international stockists.
Claire Mac Cumhail is a philosopher based in the North East of England, and working at Durham University as an associate professor. She mostly works on topics related to perception - particularly spatial perception, and, in aesthetics, perception of form (and, more recently, the histories of thinking about both of these) – as well as the history of analytic philosophy. With Rachael Wiseman, she is co-author of Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life.
Rachael Wiseman is a Reader in Philosopher at the University of Liverpool. She works in the history of analytic philosophy (especially Wittgenstein and Anscombe) and on topics related to mind, action and language. With Clare Mac Cumhaill, she is co-author of Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life.
For more information on their current projects, see:
https://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk
https://mappingthequartet.org