Philosopher Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) makes some very good points in this review essay of the recent books we have noted previously; some excerpts:
On both accounts, each member of the quartet was able to reach her full potential as a philosopher because the Big Men on Campus—A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Richard Hare and others—were away fighting the war. Their absence was critical, these books argue, because these men, who dominated the intellectual scene at Oxford, were hell-bent on destroying traditional philosophical reflection into metaphysics and morals...
This narrative frame comes from Mary Midgley herself, who, in 2013, wrote a letter to the Guardian arguing that she and her friends were able to thrive as philosophers because “there were fewer men about then"....
While this account fits with Midgley’s idea that women are bound by their sex to do philosophy differently (and perhaps better) than men, and surely reflects her own experience of Oxford, it strikes me as out of joint with what we know about the personalities of some of her friends. The insistence of all three authors on shoehorning these women’s stories into an all-too-familiar pop-feminist narrative distorts the unique nature of the bonds these women forged together. It also insinuates, insultingly, that they needed to be treated with kid gloves in order to mature intellectually. I find it difficult to believe that Anscombe needed to be sheltered from the clever men of Oxford in order to cultivate her legendary philosophical habits, or that Murdoch would have lacked the boldness to hold her own in a room full of men who plainly lacked the imaginative vision she herself possessed...
But what about Lipscomb’s other claim, that what the women were up to at Oxford during the 1940s and 1950s was a joint philosophical project of rejecting the most basic assumptions of the moral anti-realists who had come to power at Oxford, and of putting in its place an account of moral truth grounded in classical accounts of human nature? This grossly oversimplifies and distorts the philosophical differences between these women. For example, Murdoch plainly rejects an Aristotelian teleological metaphysics of nature....
Murdoch’s contemplative, mystical Platonism is miles away from Foot’s neo-Aristotelian account of specifically human goodness and virtue as necessary for human flourishing....
The truth is that Foot and Murdoch are different in both substance and style, and thus I also reject Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman’s claim that what unites the members of the quartet is their embrace of mystery, metaphysics and the search for transcendence in their philosophical writing. I do not find a whiff of the mystical, the mysterious or even the transcendent in Foot. Foot’s moral philosophy is eminently practical, grounded in careful analysis of how we use language in everyday life....
I do not think we can find a philosophical project—positive or negative—that these four women held in common, and we should resist the temptation to look for one as the ground of their unity as a quartet of philosophers who are worthy of our attention. While we can see how they influenced one another’s thoughts in a variety of ways, there was no program or even style of philosophy that they all shared or worked to advance together. Rather, if anything binds these women together into a meaningful unity, it is the intellectual friendship between them.
Although I don't share the author's high opinion of Anscombe (Foot seems to me the most interesting philosopher of the four, but I went to Michigan, not Pittsburgh!), I thought this was a judicious and intelligent assessment, as I hope the excerpts suggest.
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