Mary Midgley Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Mary Midgley, organized by topic.
Browse Mary Midgley by topic
Mary Midgley on Freedom
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“Consideration of motives brings up the matter of free will. I had better say once, that my project of taking animal comparisons seriously does not involve a slick mechanistic or deterministic view of freedom. Animals are not machines; one of my main concerns is to combat this notion. Actually only machines are machines.”
Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Mary Midgley on God
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“Still, people have a lot of obvious and important things that other species do not–speech, rationality, culture and the rest. Comparison must deal with these. I have tried to discuss some of the most important of them, not attempting at all to deny their uniqueness, but merely to grasp how they occur in what is, after a primate species, not a brand of machine or a type of disembodied spirit. I have tried to show these capabilites as continuous with our animal nature, connected with our basic structure of motives.”
Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Mary Midgley on Justice
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“We are not just rather like animals ; we are animals. Our difference from other species may be striking, but comparisons with them have always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves.”
Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Mary Midgley on Knowledge
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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:
“We need a different kind of conversation about science and ethics.”
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“Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.”
Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Mary Midgley on Life
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“Every age has its pet contradictions. Thirty years ago we used to accept Marx and Freud together, and then wonder, like the chameleon on the turkey carpet, why life was so confusing.”
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 1.
Mary Midgley on Love
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Attributed to Mary Midgley:
“Compassion is the basic moral fact.”
Mary Midgley on Mind
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“The preliminary outward movement of thought—holism—is everybit as necessary as the inward, atomizing one and in any investigation it usually needs to come first.”
Are You an Illusion (2014). 30.
Mary Midgley on Nature
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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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“Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).”
We are not just rather like animals ; we are animals. Our difference from other species may be striking, but comparisons with them have always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves. -
“Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).”
Still, people have a lot of obvious and important things that other species do not–speech, rationality, culture and the rest. Comparison must deal with these. I have tried to discuss some of the most important of them, not attempting at all to deny their uniqueness, but merely to grasp how they occur in what is, after a primate species, not a brand of machine or a type of disembodied spirit. I hav -
“Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).”
Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not. -
“Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).”
Other areas were being mapped by anthropologists, who seemed to have some interest in my problem, but who were inclined (at that time) to say that what human beings had in common was not in the end very important; that the key to all the mysteries did lie in culture. This seemed to me shallow. It is because our culture is changing so fast, because it does not settle on everything that we need to g -
“Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).”
Consideration of motives brings up the matter of free will. I had better say once, that my project of taking animal comparisons seriously does not involve a slick mechanistic or deterministic view of freedom. Animals are not machines; one of my main concerns is to combat this notion. Actually only machines are machines. -
“All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.”
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). -
“Many natural patterns, such as the arrangement of buds on a stem, accord with the series of Fibonacci numbers , and Fibonacci spirals are also observed in spiral nebulae. There are, moreover, no flying pigs …”
Review of 'What Darwin Got Wrong' by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli Palmarini (2010) .
Mary Midgley on Time
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“Other areas were being mapped by anthropologists, who seemed to have some interest in my problem, but who were inclined (at that time) to say that what human beings had in common was not in the end very important; that the key to all the mysteries did lie in culture. This seemed to me shallow. It is because our culture is changing so fast, because it does not settle on everything that we need to go into these questions.”
Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).
Mary Midgley on Virtue
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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.”