Books

In this issue we look at two books on four famous female philosophers and friends; and another on the liberating experience of teaching philosophy in prison.

- KATIE BARRON & DR AMNA WHISTON

Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman

The Women Are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb

TWO BOOKS HAVE recently been published within months of each other exploring the lives of the same four female philosophers and making the same claim that these four friends were the leaders in demolishing the logical positivism and moral relativism that dominated Englishlanguage philosophy in the mid-twentieth century.

The four young philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch, met as undergraduates in Oxford during the Second World War and became close friends. Women had only recently been allowed to take degrees at Oxford. Suddenly, all the young men were away fighting, and the women could spread their wings.

Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot both became philosophy tutors at Somerville College, Oxford. Anscombe wrote five books, including Intention (1957) - a key work for moral philosophers. She also translated Ludwig Wittgenstein's works into English. Foot developed the now well-known 'trolley' thought experiments which still highlight moral dilemmas, and are also used in psychological experiments: A runaway trolley, or tram, is on a crash course to kill a dozen people working down the line on the track. You are standing by the points when you see what is about to happen. Should you pull the lever to divert the train onto another track, so that you willfully kill just one person working on the other line?

Iris Murdoch wrote loving letters to all three friends, and wrote much else on love, both in her novels and in her philosophy. In the years after the war, Murdoch was also a chief expounder of French existentialism to the Anglophone world. She had met Jean-Paul Sartre while doing relief work in continental Europe.