Metaphysical Animals

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s joint biography follows Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, and Philippa Foot through Oxford in the 1940s — four women who entered philosophy when most of the men had left for the war, and who collectively remade the discipline. The book traces how their friendship shaped their thinking, and how their thinking shaped a generation.

We used the authors’ own book club guide from mappingthequartet.org to structure the session, which turned out to be an exceptional resource — it frames each chapter around questions that go beyond summary and push you toward the philosophical stakes.

The session opened with the question of recognition: why are these four women not household names the way their male contemporaries are, and what does that tell us about how philosophy canonises itself? We talked about the difference between being written about and being cited — and how Murdoch, the only one of the four to become famous, became famous for her fiction rather than her philosophy.

The Quartet’s hostility to linguistic philosophy — the Oxford fashion of their day — gave the session its best argument: whether philosophy that turns away from ethics, animals, and embodied life is philosophy at all, or just grammar at scale.

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