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.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Mary Midgley:
“Philosophy is more like plumbing than people often suppose.”
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Attributed to Mary Midgley:
“Compassion is the basic moral fact.”
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Attributed to Mary Midgley:
“We are not just rational beings; we are also social and emotional beings.”
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Attributed to Mary Midgley:
“The notion of pure altruism is as much a myth as that of pure selfishness.”
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Attributed to Mary Midgley:
“Animals are not just things; they are members of our moral world.”