Virtual Event: Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

Harvard Book Store virtual event series welcomes philosophy scholars CLARE MAC CUMHAILL and RACHAEL WISEMAN for a discussion of their co-authored book Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life.

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About Metaphysical Animals

The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war’s darkest revelations.

Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt. Their answer was to bring philosophy back to life. We are metaphysical animals, they realized, creatures that can question their very being. Who am I? What is freedom? What is human goodness? The answers we give, they believed, shape what we will become.

Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a lively portrait of women who shared ideas, but also apartments, clothes and even lovers. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman show how from the disorder and despair of the war, four brilliant friends created a way of ethical thinking that is there for us today.

Praise for Metaphysical Animals

“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?' Philosophy aficionados will relish the discussion." —Booklist

“This edifying debut by philosophy professors Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman tells the stories of four female philosophy pioneers: Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch . . . the research is thorough and provides a cogent counternarrative to traditional male-centric histories of mid–20th-century philosophy. These four philosophers might not appear on standard syllabi, but this detailed chronicle makes a persuasive case that they should." —Publishers Weekly

“How did it come about that in the epoch of the greatest imaginable political evil, of the Holocaust and of the Gulag, of Hitler and Stalin, Oxford philosophy tended to empty moral terms of any absolute significance? It fell to four women philosophers, each born in the years between 1918 and 1920, to object to this sad state of affairs. They then set about - each in her different way - a root-and-branch reform of moral philosophy. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman have written a wonderful, important and also a necessary book, which sets the record straight, is brim-full of fascinating detail and which honours and celebrates a remarkable quartet of women thinkers.” —Peter Conradi