Book completed

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, by Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman. This is the interesting story of how, in the late 1930s, the younger generation of male philosophers at Oxford fell under the spell of A.J. Ayer, who declared metaphysics dead and that philosophy should henceforth focus on a rather mathematical study of language and logic – but then the men went off to war, and the female students at Oxford concluded that Ayer’s position was nonsense and that we really do need philosophy to consider questions like ethics and meaningfulness and actions in context. The four women who worked on this problem most prominently were Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgely Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. I’d read quite a few Murdoch novels when I was a teen but hadn’t gotten to her philosophy – and now that I know she was critiquing Sartre and building on Buber, I am much more interested!

The book was at its best when focusing on just one of the women at a time, and also when talking about their ideas (as the authors are themselves philosophers). Their focus was largely biographical, while another book published just a year earlier focuses more on the four women’s specific contributions to ethics. Sometimes it was confusing, especially before I had a clear image of each of the women. For example, around page 107-109, they’re talking about the friendship at one point between Iris and Mary, then they focus on Iris’s romantic relationships at that time, then they spend three short sentences telling us that Mary was reading Clarissa while commuting from her parents’ house but in the very same paragraph they launch into an extended discussion of Iris’s living situation. I’d rather Mary’s living situation had been addressed separately, as it really broke up the flow, and it wasn’t the first time that details about one woman were awkwardly tacked onto a more extended discussion of another. I am sure I would have also gotten more out of the book if they had taken more care to introduce the many other people whose names were casually dropped here and there, and especially a bit more discussion of how their contributions to ethics were different? more important? than the Oxford men who apparently were soon working on the same general topic once the war ended. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book overall.

Book completed

Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes, by Paul Strathern. Some years back, I read an insightful telling of the life of Wittgenstein that explained his significance for modern philosophy and, importantly, the differences between his early work and his later work. This was before I was keeping track of the books I'd read, so I don't know what it would have been - probably a chapter in a popular history of philosophy? I cannot find it on my own shelves, and I hoped this brief look at Wittgenstein's thinking would be a reasonable equivalent. It was not. The author focuses on how miserable Wittgenstein was, and how miserable he made others, without much insight into his thinking, except that he supposedly killed the field of philosophy twice. I'm afraid that five minutes with Wikipedia gave me a lot more useful information than this book. I'd have enjoyed its satiric tone a lot more if the author also conveyed why Wittgenstein is considered the most important philosopher of the 20th century.