Metaphysical Animals — the women philosophers who countered logical positivism

“The women are up to something.” That was the rumour circulating among male Oxford dons as they gathered on May 1, 1956, ahead of a vote on a proposal by the university to award an honorary degree to the former US president Harry Truman.

In fact, one woman in particular was up to something: the philosopher and Catholic convert Elizabeth Anscombe, who believed that a man she regarded as a murderer should not be honoured in this way. In ordering the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Anscombe argued, Truman had chosen to kill the innocent as a means to an end (the end in this instance being the unconditional surrender of Imperial Japan). And “choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends,” she added, “is always murder”.

Though there were suspicions that Anscombe had “got up a party” to block the award, in the end hers was a lone voice. And the motion to bestow the degree on Truman was passed unanimously.

[The women] resisted the zealots who thought most of the traditional problems of philosophy could be dissolved provided we paid close enough attention to the way language works

The following year Anscombe wrote a pamphlet about the affair, and in it she wondered how it was that “so many Oxford people should be willing to flatter such a man”. The answer, she thought, lay partly in the “productions of Oxford moral philosophy” — notably in a doctrine, popularised in the 1930s by AJ “Freddie” Ayer, according to which moral or ethical terms such as “good” don’t describe the intrinsic goodness of some action or other, but rather express a “favourable attitude” on the part of the person uttering them. In other words, it’s one thing to say that I approve of acts of charity, say, and another to say that they are good in and of themselves.

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s lively and enlightening book, Metaphysical Animals, opens with Anscombe’s vain opposition to Truman. Her undaunted stance, and the work of her friends and fellow philosophers Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch (who in 1956 was better known for her philosophical essays than for her fiction), illuminate what the authors describe as a “counter narrative to the prevailing history of 20th-century philosophy”.

It might be more accurate to say that what emerges here is a counter to a way of writing the history of philosophy that was prevalent in mid-century Oxford, which, in the words of one of its denizens, was “for a shortish time . . . the philosophical centre of the world” — the English-speaking world at any rate.

Gilbert Ryle, the éminence grise of the Oxford school of philosophy, who, like several of his peers, had worked in the secret intelligence services during the second world war, embarked on what Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman describe as a “great non-military expansionist campaign” to train and then send out into the world a new generation of young philosophers equipped with the latest analytical techniques.

In the same year as Truman received his degree, the BBC Third Programme broadcast a series of talks under the heading The Revolution in Philosophy, later published as a book edited by Ryle. This was a manifesto for a revolutionary view of the nature of the discipline according to which it is the study of the words and concepts we employ, rather than of the things to which they are applied.

Take the concept of “mind”. In Ryle’s view, it is a “category mistake” to think that mental concepts such as “belief”, “desire” and so on function in the same way as the words we use to describe the material world. When we talk about a person’s “mind”, he said, what we’re really talking about is his or her being disposed to behave in certain ways — intelligently, stupidly or imaginatively.

This “ordinary language” or “linguistic” philosophy was largely indifferent to broader problems of a moral, political or religious kind — problems that, by contrast, fascinated the subjects of Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s book.

Linguistic philosophy had certainly helped to encourage in its practitioners the cultivation of a nose for verbiage and bullshit. But for Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch, “clarity [was] not enough”. In different ways, each of them felt the pull of “large-scale metaphysics” — that is, the big questions about the ultimate nature of reality and the good life that the Ancient Greeks had wrestled with.

When news of the Nazi death camps had emerged at the end of the war, Foot remarked: “Nothing is going to be the same again.” Yet, Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman write, “philosophy [was] speechless in the face of this new reality”. Foot thought that in their zeal to reconfigure and streamline the subject, the Oxonian revolutionaries had made it hard to see how “one could imagine oneself saying to a Nazi, ‘But we are right, and you are wrong’, with there being any substance to the statement.”

This was because the ordinary language philosophers had inherited from the logical positivism of the 1930s, a distinction between those bits of our speech which state facts about the world — for example, that water boils at 100C — and those that express principles, policies or decisions to change it — that certain sorts of behaviour should be outlawed, say. Because the language of evaluation is essentially emotive, people might agree on all the facts and still disagree on ethical or political matters. Though if values are merely subjective, then such disagreements must ultimately be trivial.

Anscombe pointed out that this way of treating moral principles fitted very well with the belief, widespread by the mid-1950s, that substantial conflict over values or ideology was at an end. But in their unfashionable view that it is possible, as Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman put it, to “use [the] language of morals and speak of objective moral truth”, and their conviction that human beings are “social, creative, curious, spiritual” creatures rather than mere “efficient calculating machines”, the four heroines of this book were untimely. They resisted the zealots who thought most of the traditional problems of philosophy could be dissolved provided we paid close enough attention to the way language works.

As an account of four young women who sought to “bring philosophy back to life”, Metaphysical Animals is a portrait in intellectual courage.

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Chatto & Windus £25, 416 pages

Jonathan Derbyshire is the FT’s executive opinion editor

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