How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman
Doubleday ($32.50)

by Scott F. Parker

Joining the burgeoning genre of collective philosophical biography, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, puts Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch at the center of a story of friendship and of analytic philosophy’s renewed interest in metaphysics and morals.

Cumhaill and Wiseman came to their subject thanks to a letter Midgley published “in the Guardian, under the heading ‘The Golden Age of Female Philosophy’” in 2013. Soon after, they visited Midgley to learn the story their book would eventually tell.

Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch converged at Oxford during tumultuous times. Many of the men—professors as well as students—were summoned to World War II; among them was A. J. Ayer, the influential logical positivist and Metaphysical Animals’ bête noire. In his absence, philosophy’s preoccupation with linguistics and its rejection of metaphysics loosened. During the war, the women found themselves at the center of the philosophical scene: “Had it not been for the interruption of war, Mary, Iris, Elizabeth and Philippa may well have joined the men in the effort to usher in the brave new world of a philosophy divested of poetry, mystery, spirit and metaphysics. Or, more likely, they would have finished their degrees and left philosophy behind them, convinced . . . that the subject was not for them.” These were, in other words, bleak philosophical times.

Taking advantage of the opportunity only accidentally available to them, the four were able to pursue philosophy with a more person-centric approach than had been prominent at Oxford. But what the four philosophers had in common beyond their circumstances is where Metaphysical Animals begins to break down. Cumhaill and Wiseman present Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch as members of a movement grounded in gender. Yet, by giving short shrift to the philosophical work in question and opting instead to focus on the day-to-day lives of the philosophers, they fail to draw connections in any but the most general terms—those terms being their opposition to Ayer and logical positivism, which scores of other philosophers shared.

This substantive lightness is only emphasized by the book’s historical frame, which concludes with Anscombe’s opposition to the honorary doctorate Oxford would bestow upon Harry Truman in 1956, thereby relegating all four women’s greatest professional achievements to a brief afterword. This is a missed opportunity to affirm the legacies of four great philosophers, who deserve greater prominence. Consider that the famous Trolley Problem was originated by Philippa Foot. Besides making serious contributions to the philosophy of animals, in her nineties Mary Midgley wrote a defense of philosophy, What Is Philosophy For?, the culmination of a lifetime of thought, that became a surprise mainstream hit. Cumhaill and Wiseman are most thorough in their disquisition of Elizabeth Anscombe, probably the most influential philosopher of the four. They write that “it is thanks to her translation that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is recognised as a literary, as well as a philosophical, masterpiece” and call her book Intention “the most important treatment of action since Aristotle.” Murdoch is the best known of the four, though primarily for her novels and for having been portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judi Dench in the film Iris, an impression Metaphysical Animals is unlikely to alter.

Cumhaill and Wiseman say they were “bored of listening to men talk about books by men about men” when they set out on their book. Fair enough. But shoehorning four women who happened to be friends into an ill-defined school only serves to obscure each woman’s unique contributions to philosophy.

Still, though, seeing their early shared lives is not without its pleasures. Metaphysical Animals is a period piece, replete with dress codes, cigarettes, and ubiquitous casual misogyny. It is a portrait of four philosophers as young women. Here they are, for example, sitting down together for conversation: “Philippa explained her idea over the clatter of the busy café, the Nippy serving up a pot of hot tea for Mary and Philippa, black coffee for Iris and Elizabeth.” And so, rather than learning what they thought in their maturity, we will settle for what they drank in their youth.

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An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time

Maria Stavrinaki
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
Zone Books ($35)

by W. C. Bamberger

In the first sentence of Transfixed by Prehistory, Maria Stavrinaki declares that prehistory is an invention of the nineteenth century; the subtitle of the book refers to her assertion that early moderns were "transfixed by prehistory, initially in the sense of being petrified by shock." Throughout, she demonstrates how the revelation of the existence of prehistory drastically changed the science, the art, the metaphors, and even the concept of time in the modern world. The invention of prehistory moved outward from geology and paleontology to the arts and sciences that have humankind as their objects, including linguistics, ethnology, psychology, and literature. New metaphors arose; geological erosion came to represent human mortality.

Stavrinaki considers a wide range of prehistory's effects. She looks at the extent of the influence of discoveries by Lascaux on modern art, of geology on Cezanne and Max Ernst, and of prehistory's philosophical implications for Paul Klee, among others. Klee, for example, thought these discoveries revealed "the present state of outward appearances in his own world as accidentally fixed in time and space," "a simple stage in an evolution . . ." Stavrinaki points out prehistory’s influence in more recent art as well, looking at the work of Robert Morris and at Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, for example. While some of these attempts to identify parallels between more recent artists' works and the prehistorical can seem less than convincing, she offers insights from a great variety of sources, ranging from historical records to the science fiction of J. G. Ballard; especially interesting is an excerpt from a letter written by Claude Lévi-Strauss to Georges Bataille, disagreeing with Bataille's view of Lascaux.

As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that Stavrinaki's points could be supported by looking at nearly everything around us—we are, in many ways, a continuation of prehistory. The invention of prehistory affected not only our views of the past and understanding of the present, but also, for some, the conception of the future. That is, "the tendency to improvement" over such spans of time suggested that the process would continue indefinitely: "Assurances about the future were thus to be found, quite simply, in the past: time formed an uninterrupted line." To some, however, the same discoveries suggested the opposite—that there might come an end to human time. The invention of prehistory introduced the idea of that we might one day have successors.

Stavrinaki's reasoning proceeds speedily, and there are places where slow, careful reading is required to follow what is being said. This is partly due to some unfamiliar terms: "mobilary art" for small objects that can be moved from place to place, and "parietal art” for what we usually call cave art—though technical terms are usually introduced smoothly. The larger reason for the need for slow reading is the serious and sober approach Stavrinaki takes to her subject. This flies in the face of the recent leaning of many scholarly books toward popularization; rather than taking time to reassure readers that she likes some of the same rock bands she assumes we must like, Stavrinaki takes up detailed analysis of her subject from page one.

There are metaphysical speculations here, but there are simple human anecdotes, too. Stavrinaki includes the well-known story of the explorer who was so fixated on a cave's floor that he didn't notice the drawings above; his eight-year-old daughter looked up, saw them, and pointed them out to him. Another discoverer she cites wrote that he couldn't really "see" engravings that were visible on the wall until he also traced them with his fingers.

Stavrinaki employs some rhetorical flourishes in the interest of making interesting points; for example, she asserts that explorers' and researchers' presentations of the facts of prehistory meant that "science now ranked alongside fiction, because it proved the reality of the impossible." At another point, she posits that because there are no written records, nor any named individual creators, prehistory can't be "done," can't be tied up neatly, can't be consolidated in the past. Rather, she argues, it remains to be done, inexhaustibly so—it remains "as an enigma from the past to be interpreted in terms of the present's needs." In her concluding paragraph, she writes, "Prehistory is no doubt the only land that remains for us to discover." This thoughtful, no-nonsense book would be a useful guide for anyone setting out on such an ambitious expedition.

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