To mention Oxford University is to evoke an awe-inspiring, almost frightening atmosphere that is not far from magical. An oasis of apparent silence that was the scene of passionate philosophical debates, an all-male place where, in the mid-20th century, a group of dissidents did their best to rescue philosophy from orthodox analytical limbo and transform it into reality.
Several books explore the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot. They are A Terribly Serious Adventure by Nikhil Krishnan (Paidós, 2023); The Oxford Quartet by Benjamin JB Lipscomb (Shackleton, 2023) and Metaphysical Animals. How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman (2022).
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Anscombe, Midgley, Murdoch and Foot had different backgrounds, but they share common characteristics: all four were born between 1919 and 1920, they were educated at Oxford when male students were called up to fight in the Second World War, and in their own way they all bonded together and rebelled against analytical thinking because it is schematized in understanding the world. The Oxford school of analytical philosophy taught that there were no moral truths and that all the answers lay in science. But they did not adapt to the dominant discourse – which was not easy in an environment as overwhelming as the Oxonian – when they realized that the positivist philosophy typical of this school confused its theory and its analytical tools with reality. And the dark reality back then was war, the atomic bomb and the Holocaust.
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The rediscovery of empathy
Encouraged by teachers like Eduard Fraenkel and Donald MacKinnon, the four friends devoured books, danced at secret parties and debated ethics, evil and love between cigarettes, glasses of whiskey, cups of tea and biscuits. They also reflected on the first images of Nazi death camps to arrive in England, a fact that forever changed their philosophical perspective. In the face of this clear, radical cruelty, they salvaged the concept of a shared ethic and the rediscovery of empathy, generosity, trust, cooperation or creativity in human action, as Wiseman and Mac Cumhaill point out in an email exchange.
In the analytic system, moral claims were considered neither true nor false, but rather as subjective expressions of the person making them. But for these philosophers there were actions that could not be mere opinions. “Morality must be objective, they thought, or else how could we properly talk about the Holocaust?” reflects Lipscomb, author of The Oxford Quartet, in an email conversation. According to Lipscomb, the group’s greatest legacy was to promote a renewed school of thought on moral philosophy.
Mary Midgley (seated, second from left) and Iris Murdoch (second from right in white shirt in second row) at Somerville College, Oxford. The Principal and Fellows of Somerville College.
“Concern and debate about the nature of the good and human reality will continue, whether they are considered part of philosophy or not,” warned Irishwoman Iris Murdoch, then Oxford professor and reader of Plato, Sartre, who died in Oxfordshire in 1999 and Simone Weil’s work examines the fragility of “doing good,” which she defines as something that must be learned based on moral choices and will.
In the post-war period he took part in some United Nations projects to help displaced people in Austria and Belgium, where he experienced a broken life with no future. He decided then that a worthwhile philosophy should be concerned with this: providing tools to people with specific social and emotional problems, people who “go to the movies, make love and fight for or against Hitler,” he wrote.
A stubborn advocate of the search for knowledge based on experience, she reflected lives full of questions, thoughts and fictions in her essays and novels such as The Sea. He understood that a new society was being created, dedicated to science and technology, and that it needed a metaphysical and moral compass. He was interested in the concept of commitment and wrote that the essence of art and morality is love, a gesture of acceptance of people as they are, without fantasies. An intellectual who was interested in everything and everyone, her writing reflects the ethical choices we must make in our everyday affairs.
What we do (or don’t do)
Murdoch was a close friend and roommate of Philippa Foot (they had a mutual boyfriend). The latter came from a rich family that never viewed her passion for philosophy positively – “at least she doesn’t seem intelligent,” an acquaintance comforted her mother. But that was his firm decision. She worked first at Oxford, where she became associate dean, and then at several universities in the United States, where she died in 2010. She wrote about the ethics of duty and reflected on the difference between “doing” and “making it happen” in books such as “The Virtues and Vices.” Foot is known for the tram dilemma: a tram without brakes threatens to run over five people and the driver has no time to warn them, but he could pull a lever to redirect to another track where only one is person is located. What should the driver do: not intervene or change the course of the tram? She was an early proponent of so-called moral realism, the idea that there can be true moral statements and that values cannot be completely separated from facts.
Foot sometimes met her friend Anscombe for a chat in the university’s Socratic Club, with its Victorian drawing room and wallpapered walls. They agreed that they would not engage in cumbersome dialectical contests or search for a philosophical system that would provide a “complete explanation” for everything. For Anscombe, quackery was “the great intellectual vice and the recognition that a problem is complex was a great virtue,” as Lipscomb points out.
Like Murdoch or Foot, Anscombe was interested in the concept of intention and action, thereby enlivening the debate about the ethics of war. The British philosopher would probably now reopen the debate about the brutal effects on the civilian population in view of what is happening in Ukraine, Yemen or Israel and Palestine. Days ago, Neta C. Crawford, also a professor at Oxford and an expert on conflict, warned that the death toll in Gaza shows that the speed of deaths during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century, which has been plagued by wars like those in Afghanistan has. Iraq or Syria.
Truman, “Murderer”
As a student and successor of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein – who began to question how we learn language as a teacher in an Austrian city – Anscombe believed that analytic philosophy was the product of a conformist environment, which it was not. In 1956 he publicly clashed with Oxford over the decision to honor former US President Harry Truman.
For the author of Modern Moral Philosophy, Truman was a “murderer” because the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not fight against the Allies and the decision to drop the bomb was a calculation to achieve unconditional surrender. Therefore, “the decision to kill an innocent person to achieve one’s goals is always murder,” he wrote. If such an act was not an obstacle for Anscombe to receive an honor, then the philosophical decay ran deep: he left aside what was truly just and good and focused on the concepts of “just” or “good”.
Anscombe was a thinking machine. One of her students remembers that after a session with her, “my brain was so exhausted that (…) I had to sleep for a few hours.” As a mother of seven children who died in 2001, she did not agree with social constraints . At Oxford the teachers had to teach in skirts, but she preferred to wear trousers, so she put on a skirt over them at the classroom door just before class started.
In her own way, Mary Midgley was also disappointed in Oxford for its narrow-mindedness. His interests were diverse and his approach was integrative. He studied philosophy, biology, psychology, ethics and politics and wrote about people, chickens, octopuses and molluscs. He decided to leave Oxford and raise his family in Newcastle because that university’s smaller and more modest campus made it easier to combine forces and develop ideas.
View of the High Street, Magdalen College and its tower, Oxford, England, in the early 1950s. Harold Lloyd (GETTY IMAGES)
He was interested in the complexity of people and was not interested in inventing values, but in discovering them. For them, this is the difference between abstraction and understanding. The oldest of the group – she died in 2018 – Midgley published her first book when she was around 60 years old. He was both animal and human, and with him he expanded thought patterns by delving into our animal nature. “It deals with the idea that rationality, language and culture are not at odds with emotional structure; They are his complement,” explains Helen de Cruz, professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University, via video conference.
In contrast to academic classism, Midgley viewed philosophy as a daily activity that we should all pursue. “Like plumbing problems, she says we only realize their significance when something goes very wrong,” De Cruz points out. Years ago, Midgley – “the greatest scourge of scientific sophistication” according to The Guardian – repeatedly warned about the climate crisis due to the blindness of the idea of endless progress, but was ignored. “Now it won’t be so much,” concludes De Cruz.
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