Mary Midgley (1919-2018)

Nat Dyer looks at the humanity of a philosopher who tried to make philosophy more human.

- Nat Dyer

Virtually all the famous philosophers in Western history were lifelong bachelors, pointed out Mary Midgley. Plato, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and more, never married nor lived with children. This helps explain, she said, why European philosophy was so abstract and detached from human life. She spent a lifetime trying to make it breathe again.

Midgley – one of the most important philosophers of recent times – took a different path. She published the first of her eighteen books at almost sixty, only after raising her children. She was ‘jolly glad’ for the delay, she told an interviewer: “I didn’t know what I thought before then.” Once her mind was made up, though, she expressed her ideas with uncommon clarity and force. As well as her books, she wrote hundreds of articles [including some for this magazine, Ed], on human nature, evolution, animals, myths, and poetry. She wrote in a vivid, jargonfree style rare for contemporary English-speaking philosophers, using striking, down-to-earth images: of aquariums, Lego, the plumbing under the floor…

Her penetrating style was never more apparent than when she kicked off the intellectual brawl for which many still know her. In 1979, when Midgley was a comparatively little-known thinker working in a provincial university, she wrote an article for the journal Philosophy on the moral consequences of Richard Dawkins’ global smash hit,