Mary Midgley 1919 – 2018

Mary Midgley was a British moral philosopher and one of the small group of women who shaped Oxford philosophy during the Second World War, alongside Anscombe, Foot, and Iris Murdoch. She did not publish her first book, Beast and Man, until she was in her fifties, but went on to produce a long series of widely read works in moral philosophy, philosophy of biology, and the critique of scientism. She insisted that ethics is continuous with the rest of natural human life and that philosophy must deal with whole persons rather than with idealized abstractions. She remained intellectually active well into her late nineties.

Mary Midgley, born Mary Beatrice Scrutton in 1919 in London, was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. She read classics and philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford during the war years and belonged there to the remarkable cohort of women — Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and herself — whose later work redirected English moral philosophy. After marrying the philosopher Geoffrey Midgley in 1950 and raising three sons, she returned to teaching at the University of Newcastle in the late 1960s.

Her first book, Beast and Man, appeared in 1978, when she was fifty-nine. It was followed by Heart and Mind (1981), Wickedness (1984), Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Science as Salvation (1992), The Ethical Primate, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers, The Myths We Live By, and the late What Is Philosophy For? (2018), together with a long stream of essays in journals and the popular press and an autobiography, The Owl of Minerva.

Midgley argued for the continuity of human and animal psychology, against the gene-centric reductionism of sociobiology — her exchanges with Richard Dawkins are among the best-known philosophical disputes of recent decades — and for a richer moral philosophy attentive to the imaginative and mythic structures by which people actually live. She died in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2018, having published a book in her hundredth year.