THE WOMEN ARE UP TO SOMETHING

THE WOMEN ARE UP TO SOMETHING

How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary
Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb

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ISBN 978–0–19–754107–4
eISBN 978–0–19–754109–8

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197541074.001.0001
To Mary Lipscomb, Susan Lipscomb, and Josephine Lipscomb, and to the
memory of Barbara Lipscomb
 CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on Names
A Note to American Readers

1. Facts and Values

2. Oxford in Wartime
3. Daughters of 1919
4. The Coming Philosophers
5. Murdoch’s Diagnosis
6. Elizabeth Anscombe versus the World
7. The Somerville Senior Common Room
8. Slipping Out Over the Wall
9. “Time, Like the Sea . . .”

Notes
Image Credits
Bibliography
Index
 PREFACE

On a chill March morning in 2010, I found myself just north of the Newcastle
city center, walking a path along the bottom of Jesmond Dene, pausing
sometimes to see what was stirring. Birds and more birds, mostly—the Dene
is famous for its dawn chorus—but a few mammals, too: squirrels, a lone
urban fox. I had an invitation for lunch, just west of the ravine. But I was
already enjoying Mary Midgley’s hospitality.
I had written to Midgley in December through her publisher, asking if she
would be willing to talk. I explained I was planning a book about her and
three of her friends: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch.
I’d been reading these four philosophers for years before learning that they’d
all been at Oxford together. Now I thought there should be a book about them.
I was interested not only in their beginnings and their friendships but also in
their ideas: how they had challenged the anti-realist ethics of their male
contemporaries and developed an alternative. I told her I would be in
England for the next several months, teaching in my college’s honors
semester in London. I didn’t know yet what I should ask, but: would she be
willing to meet?
Midgley did more to inspire this project than anyone. I began thinking
about it while reading her memoir, The Owl of Minerva. Midgley could have
been a novelist, like her friend Iris Murdoch. The Owl of Minerva is as vivid
and funny and wise as a good novel. It first made me aware of the story I tell
here: four women with wildly different backgrounds and temperaments doing
something revolutionary—and doing it together, as friends. At one point,
reflecting on how she and Anscombe and Foot and Murdoch all ended up in
philosophy when they had almost no role models, Midgley remarks: “in
normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply
doesn’t get heard.”1 There was nothing normal, though, about the time when
she and her friends were at university. The Second World War was on,
depleting Oxford of men. The best teachers who remained no longer had
many advanced male students. They gave their full attention to Midgley and
her friends, some of the most brilliant women in England or in the whole
Western world.
♦♦♦♦
I owe as much to Midgley’s personal generosity as to the prompting of her
memoir. As soon as my letter arrived, she emailed to say she’d be happy to
talk. If I took the train up from London, I could visit her at her home, the
ground floor of a terraced house near the Dene. She said she’d feed me
before I returned home. We fixed a date. Thinking that, for a nonagenerian
interviewee, I’d better be available whenever she preferred, I booked an
early departure from Kings Cross to Newcastle and a late return.
Midgley was a little surprised when I told her I would be in Newcastle by
9. She had supposed, reasonably, that I wouldn’t arrive until past noon. I
assured her I was happy to take in the local sights until she wanted to meet; I
had never been north. At which point, she threw herself into sketching my
itinerary:
[I]f the weather’s fine, you should surely start by going down to the quayside—which is only 5
minutes from the station—and looking at the bridges, which range from Stephenson’s 1842 two-
level affair to the fascinating recently built Millennium Bridge. And if you can come up from the
quayside via The Side and Grey Street, you will see the fine classical town centre, topped by Lord
Grey of the Reform Bill on a whacking big pillar.2

She also reviewed the local art museums, but concluded, “I’ll expect you
when I see you.” Later, she mentioned about the Dene.
When I finally arrived at the end of the morning, the first thing Midgley did
was serve me lunch, cheese on toast with lentil soup. We began talking at the
wall-mounted table in the small kitchen in the back of the house, then made
our way forward to the library looking out onto the lane. All afternoon, she
urged tea on me, and biscuits from a plaid tin. We both lost track of time—
either that, or she was just being generous.
My notes from that day aren’t terribly useful. Again, I didn’t yet know
what to ask. But she welcomed me back twice over the next two-and-a-half
years. At one point, she sent me off to the local library with a pile of
documents from her filing cabinet to scan for my use. Each time, we had
lunch, and tea, and biscuits.
♦♦♦♦
This book is about the joint power of circumstance and character: about four
people who were in the right place and time—and in the right company—to
do unprecedented and transformative things. How did Anscombe, Foot,
Midgley, and Murdoch all follow a path that was virtually unmarked? How
did they stick together, different as they were? And how did they work their
way toward a set of ideas sharply at odds with what nearly everyone around
them thought?
For these four were doubly outsiders. Besides being women in an almost
exclusively male discipline, they were advocates of an approach to ethics
that was deeply out of fashion. As they began their careers, the dominant
view among moral philosophers was that nothing is objectively good or bad,
right or wrong, important or unimportant. Rather, all such values are
projections, a thin glaze we paint onto an otherwise valueless world. On this
view, there are no objective moral truths. As the leading theorist of the time,
Richard Hare, wrote: “I have myself chosen, as far as in me lies, my own
way of life, my own standard of values, my own principle of choice. In the
end, we all have to choose for ourselves; and no one can do it for anyone
else.”3 This wasn’t just a view about ethics; it was a view about the kind of
world we inhabit—about what’s real. It was widely supposed to be the only
acceptably modern thing to think.
These four friends diagnosed this as an intellectual fad. And they
articulated an alternative: there are moral truths, grounded in the distinctive
nature of our species—in facts about what human beings need if they are
going to thrive. They drew on neglected ancient resources—Plato, and
especially Aristotle—but also on Charles Darwin and Jane Goodall, to
explain how we are less exceptional than we imagine, and more at home in
the world. More than one thing about these women bears explanation, then.
Yes, how did they imagine their way into philosophy at all? But also, what
prepared them to resist intellectual conformity? And notwithstanding their
many differences, how did they build on one another’s work? Because they
were more than a cluster; without any of them exactly intending this, they
became a school.
There are really two stories in this book, then: first, a story about four
women, their overlapping friendships, and their struggle to establish
themselves as philosophers in an often-hostile context; second, a story about
two conflicting approaches to ethics. The two are connected. Murdoch,
Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley’s struggle to establish themselves was in part
a struggle to get a hearing for their ideas.
Over the following nine chapters, I trace the intertwining lives of these
four characters: a Bohemian novelist and spiritual seeker; a zealous Catholic
convert and mother of seven; an atheistic daughter of privilege; and a stay-at-
home mother who finally wrote the first of her 16 books in her 50s. But I also
sketch the implicit project I see in their work.
Because the project itself has to be narrated. It was an unfolding one, not
something these four devised one day over tea in the late 1940s, when they
were all back together in Oxford as postgraduates. This is unsurprising,
because what they eventually accomplished involved an imaginative leap
outside what their contemporaries and predecessors thought. Maybe some
great imaginative leaps happen all at once. More commonly, though, as
Thomas Kuhn describes and illustrates, people first raise new questions
about a dominant paradigm, freeing their audience to consider that it could be
wrong; next, others begin to try out alternatives: or perhaps just bits and
pieces of alternatives. Only later does it become possible to develop these.4
The leap outside the picture that captivated philosophers in the first half of
the twentieth century—a picture on which facts and values had little to do
with one another—was that kind of leap. It was a paradigm shift.
This is the story, then, of four women mapping a route for themselves
where none existed. It is the story of sometimes intimate, sometimes fraught
friendships among four people with a shared history and shared affection but
also profound differences. And it is the story of how four relative outsiders
felt their way to a set of controversial insights about the world and how to
live in it. Their insights make us seem, perhaps, a little less godlike—but
they also put us more in touch with the needy, reflective creatures we are.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has been a dozen years since I started this project. As Alan Jacobs
observes, we don’t really think alone. Nor do we work that way. Even
writing books, we are social animals. And I have accumulated so many
debts.
W. David Solomon, my Doktorvater at the University of Notre Dame, was
also the first person to recommend each of these philosophers to my
attention. It was at his house, on a trip through Indiana in the mid-aughts, that
my eye first lighted on Midgley’s memoir. I stayed up too late that night
reading it. There is much more to say about David’s contributions to this
book, but he knows. I gesture toward an inexpressible debt by thanking him
first.
I was interested in philosophy before I met my undergraduate mentor, John
Hare. But he modeled for me what it is to be a philosopher, and made me
want to be like that. He was magnanimous in encouraging me even as I began
to work on a group of thinkers who had steadfastly opposed his beloved
father, Richard Hare. Among many other things, he guided me to resources in
his father’s papers at the Balliol College archives and facilitated a
wonderful afternoon’s conversation with his mother, Catherine.
Alan Jacobs, when I floated this idea to him in the late aughts, said
something like “Well, it’s about time someone wrote that book.” Which was
confirming, since I admire his work. If he thought the project worthwhile,
then probably I wasn’t imagining things. I was gratified, too, to get the same
reaction from two leading figures in my guild. When I was first
contemplating this book, I Googled “Anscombe Foot Midgley Murdoch” to
see what was out there already. Among the top hits was a 2008 blog post by
Kieran Setiya, “Unwritten Books.” My first thought was, “oh, no.” But there
was no cause to worry. Kieran was tossing off ideas for books he knew he’d
never write, and offering the titles and concepts for appropriation by anyone.
He would have titled this book Oxford’s Hypatias, and said that all he
wanted was a line in the acknowledgments and a complimentary copy. In the
end, my editor and I preferred the title suggested by Candace Vogler when I
mentioned the project to her. But it felt like things coming full circle when I
learned that Kieran had done the final review of the manuscript for Oxford.
While I’ve been at this, I’ve had significant support from several
institutions. I began the project in earnest with a 2010–11 sabbatical leave
from Houghton College. I am grateful to my chair at the time, Kristina
LaCelle-Peterson, for vigorously supporting my proposal, and to President
Shirley Mullen, then-Dean Ron Mahurin, and the then-members of the
College’s Faculty Development Committee (FDC) and Board of Trustees for
approving a whole year’s leave rather than the usual one term. I am
especially grateful to my colleagues Carlton Fisher and Chris Stewart, whose
attitude about the gaps I created by going away was, “we’ll figure it out,” and
to my student assistant at the time, Ed Linnecke, who downloaded and printed
for me lots of obscure writings by my subjects and who transcribed my first
interview with Mary Midgley. Kristina and the FDC also supported my
application for funding to travel to England for archival research and
interviews in March 2011. Though it was a grief that by the time I had this
idea, Philippa Foot’s health was failing, my visit to England in 2011
coincided with a memorial symposium in her honor, at which I met a number
of people who became crucial to my work: in particular, Mary Geach
Gormally and Sir Anthony Kenny, each of whom was more than generous
with their time and insight over the following years. On that same visit, Pam
Manix arranged for me to meet Basil Mitchell, which was an honor and a
gift.
In 2012, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend made
it possible for me to return to England for six weeks, which I mostly spent at
Somerville College. I was welcomed there as an Academic Visitor and found
everyone keen to help me with a project so closely connected to the
College’s history. I especially want to thank College historian Pauline
Adams, Liz Cooke of the Somerville Association, and Librarian Anne
Manuel. Anne in particular dug up lots of interesting documents and invited
me to join her staff for their twice-daily tea breaks. Numerous long-term
faculty made time that summer to talk with me in the Somerville Senior
Common Room: notably Miriam Griffin, Barbara Harvey, and Julie Jack.
More than anyone else at Somerville, I am indebted to Lesley Brown,
Anscombe’s student and Foot’s literary executor, who sponsored my
application as an Academic Visitor, making my time at Oxford possible.
During my visit, Mark Rowe and Fanny Mitchell arranged for me to meet
Fanny’s mother, Jean Coutts Austin. That was a precious conversation, and
just in time. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my landlady in the
Jericho neighborhood, Mrs. Elphick, who, when she was in good spirits,
regaled me about the history of north Oxford and when she wasn’t, fumed
about the “second-rateness” overtaking the world. I have tried to work in a
manner she could approve.
Finally (I was speaking of institutions), my alma mater Calvin College—
now Calvin University, though I cannot adjust to it—invited me to spend
several weeks in residence during the summer of 2014. The Philosophy
Department set me up in an interior office they call “the windowless monad,”
and it was, truly, excellent for concentration. I had especially fruitful
conversations with Ruth Groenhout and with my former professor Lee Hardy
while in Grand Rapids, and gave a talk there that turned into chapter 2.
I had other opportunities to talk and write about my subjects along the way,
which helped me start to put my thoughts in order. I first produced a version
of chapter 6 for the Houghton College Faculty Lecture Series in late 2011. In
2012, I delivered a very early version of chapter 5 at Kingston University, at
the biannual conference of the Iris Murdoch Society. In 2014, I was
privileged to speak at Notre Dame at a conference in honor of David
Solomon, and presented there a version of chapter 7. It was energizing to talk
that weekend with so many people who were interested in the same figures
and topics—of course they were!—especially my old friend Margaret
Watkins and a new acquaintance, Peter Wicks. In 2016, I worked up a
version of chapter 3 for an International Women’s Day conference at the
University of Durham. That event was the inspiration and work of Luna
Dozelal, Clare MacCumhaill, and Rachael Wiseman. Clare and Rachael are
co-directors of the imaginative and energetic In Parenthesis project,
promoting the story and legacy of Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch
across a variety of media. They, too, have a book in the works about this
quartet, which I am eager to read. Chapter 8 grew out of a contribution to a
Festschrift for Mary Midgley, Science and the Self, edited by Ian Kidd and
Liz McKinnell. I am grateful to Ian and Liz for being such excellent editors
and to Routledge for allowing republication here of some passages from that
book. Finally, at the invitation of Anthony O’Hear (with logistical support
from Adam Ferner and James Garvey), I kicked off the Royal Institute of
Philosophy’s 2018–19 London lecture series with a talk that was a precís of
this book. Every time I traveled, Houghton College footed the bill.
 Many, many people sent me articles or photographs or clippings I could
use, or shared their recollections or expertise. Some of these people are
acknowledged above, but many more aren’t. I fear I am going to miss
someone, even now. I am grateful anyway to Cameron Airhart, Jimmy
Altham, Heather Bennett, Philip Bess, Justin Broackes, Sarah Broadie, John
Campbell, Alister Chapman, Gaby Charing, Anne Chisholm, Gillian Clark,
Prophecy Coles, Nicholas Denyer, Gillian Dooley, Paul Dummett, Nat Dyer,
Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Joel Ernst, Michael Foot, Elisa Grimi, John Haldane,
Jane Heal, Sheila Himsworth, Laura and Walter Hopkins, Lydia Howard,
Glyn Hughes, Rosalind Hursthouse, Jennifer Jackson, Louis Jeffries, Ian
Johnson, Jessy Jordan, Michael Kremer, Mark LaCelle-Peterson, Anton
Leist, Myfanwy Lloyd, Alasdair MacIntyre, Gregory McElwain, David
Midgley, Martin Midgley, Rob Miner, Anselm Mueller, André Muller,
Madison Murphy, Cari and Josiah Nunziato, Meic Pearse, Michael Regan,
Jean-Louis Roederer, Frs. Dominic Ryan and Nicholas Edmonds-Smith,
Mark Satta, John Schwenkler, Caleb Seeling, James Stockton, Elijah
Tangenberg, Christopher Taylor, Roger Teichmann, Honus Wagner (not that
one; the young, Catholic, international-development worker), Brian Webb,
Patricia Williams, John Wilson, and a trio of people who helped me begin to
concretely imagine Foot’s childhood in north Yorkshire: Robert Taylor,
Stewart Ramsdale and, above all, Jan Hawthorn. Christopher Coope, John
Lucas, Miranda Villiers, and Baroness Mary Warnock were particularly
generous, hosting me as well as talking with me. It is painful to reflect that
three of those four are now dead. I am glad Christopher at least will get to
see the book.
I also owe much to the archivists and librarians who assisted me in my
research: Anne Rowe, Frances White, Katie Giles (earlier) and Dayna
Miller (more recently) at Kingston University; Jessica Hogg, Fallon Lee, and
Louise North at the BBC; Daniel Cheely, Jessica Sweeney, and José Perez-
Benzo at the Collegium Institute; Marion Messenger and Portia White at the
British Academy; Andrew Gray at Durham University; and Anne Thomson at
Newnham College, Cambridge. At Oxford, I received help from Anna Sander
and Bethany Hamblen of Balliol College, Clare White of St. Anne’s College,
Amanda Ingram of St. Hugh’s College, and Colin Harris from the Bodleian
Library. I already mentioned Anne Manuel at Somerville College, and am not
sorry to do so again. More recently, I benefited a lot also from the sleuthing
of Somerville archivist Kate O’Donnell. Finally, David Stevick and Michael
Green at the Houghton College library must have spent a disproportionate
share of their Inter-Library Loan budget in recent years on my sometimes-
obscure requests. I am in their debt, too.
A crowd of friends and colleagues read and commented on proposals,
preparatory exercises, and parts of the manuscript in draft. Morgan Flannery
commented on various proposals, and John Berkman, Bob Black,
Christopher Coope, Christian Esh, Cathy Freytag, Luke and Mary Gormally,
Dave and Lori Huth, Sunshine Sullivan, and Abigail Bruxvoort-Wilson read
and commented on individual chapters. Four people deserve special thanks
for reading everything, from proposal to manuscript, and commenting in
detail on all of it. Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb read each chapter aloud before
anyone else got to see it. Though my instinct for subordinating clauses runs
deep, Susan helped me curb it. If this book is recorded someday, it will read
(and play) a lot better because of her. Susan’s and my dear friends Anna
Schilke and Brad Wilber read and commented on everything, too. Each of
them is a skilled writer (watch for their books in future!) but, more than that,
each of them has a gift for combining encouragement with honest critique.
The final draft is so much stronger thanks to their suggestions. The fourth
person who read and responded to the whole is my editor, Lucy Randall.
I owe Lucy for more than just reading and commenting on my work. In
early 2020, with the publishing world (like everything) in disarray, Lucy took
a chance on an author without a platform, writing his first book. Then, that
summer, she bent her usual procedure and gave me comments on each chapter
as it reached her like the installments of a Victorian serial. It was hugely
reassuring to know that she thought the work was on track. I am grateful for
her flexibility in guiding someone writing in a new genre. I should say too: I
owe Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press for suggesting that I show my
proposal to Lucy.
You have no idea until you write a book like this how very many nuisance
jobs must be done to bring it to publication. The stress of all this was greatly
reduced because of the patient professionalism of Lucy’s assistant, Hannah
Doyle, and that of my own temporary assistant, Katherine Stevick. The
pandemic left this exceptionally sharp, detail-oriented person improbably
unemployed, and she took on a host of things that would have crushed me to
think about. Katherine pursued permissions, assembled my bibliography and
index, drafted abstracts, and more. Hannah for her part answered I-don’t-
know-how-many emails from Katherine and me. I am indebted too to the
reviewers Lucy arranged for my initial proposal and final manuscript. I was
delighted when one of the initial reviewers outed himself: Midgley scholar
Gregory McElwain. I wrote above of my delight in learning that Kieran
Setiya had reviewed the manuscript for the Press, but did not say how
appreciative I was of his encouraging and probing comments. I was and am.
There are two people whose contributions to this book refuse to be
categorized. One is Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch’s authorized biographer,
who agreed early on to meet with me, gave me dozens of anecdotes and
impressions lying outside his 700-page account of Murdoch’s life, pointed
me toward important sources, and checked in regularly to see how I was
doing. Later, he read and commented on several chapters. Graduate school in
philosophy is no preparation for life-writing, and as Peter knew so much
about the biographer’s art and about my subjects, I appealed to him at every
turn: about publishers, about style, about how to conduct interviews and
manage my burgeoning files, about how to handle some of the less-flattering
things you turn up about any human being, even one you admire. If you
haven’t read Peter’s Iris, and this book intrigues you: do.
Then there is Mary Midgley, the only one of my subjects who lived long
enough for me to talk with her. I said more about Mary in the Preface, so here
I will just add, I was so glad to know her.
Every substantial book by a person with a family acknowledges their
contributions, or at least their longsuffering patience. If it doesn’t, it should.
Books are jealous of their authors’ attention, and people are finite. Maybe
there are writers who can get a lot done without accepting gifts of time from
their loved ones. I couldn’t. So I express my gratitude and love to Susan,
Josephine, Ernest, and Ralph, who dealt with my being away in England for a
couple of stretches in the early teens, with my missing a family trip to Idaho
in 2014, and with my being out in the backyard cabin day after day through
the final push in the summer of 2020, and then again for a string of days in
early 2021. Susan has her own scholarship to pursue, about George Eliot and
empathy and models of the natural world in literature, but she dedicated a
summer and more to helping me bring this project to completion. I don’t
know whether Iris Murdoch endorsed what Bradley Pearson writes early in
The Black Prince: “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit
oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.” But it fits my experience both of
this book and of my marriage.
 My parents and Susan’s parents took our children sometimes, so that (for
instance) Susan could come visit me in Oxford for our 15th anniversary. And
they asked and asked and asked how the book was going, whether I was
making progress, whether I’d found a publisher. So did my grandmother
Barbara Lipscomb, who was of the same generation as Anscombe, Foot,
Midgley, and Murdoch. She was looking forward to reading the book, or to
having it read to her. She died the day I finished the last chapter. And so I
dedicate the book to her memory, and to three other colorful, sharp,
imaginative, opinionated Lipscomb women: my mother Mary, my wife Susan,
and my daughter Josephine. Sine qua non.
 A NOTE ON NAMES

I decided early in the writing process that I should use last names to refer to
my subjects. It is an old dilemma. Iris Murdoch, writing to her producer at
the BBC about a talk she was preparing on the French mystical writer
Simone Weil, asked, “Is it too matey to call her Simone?”5 First names could
make my subjects seem more vivid as characters, and would sidestep the
problem of married and unmarried names. But in consultation with people I
trust, I decided it was too matey, at least for me. That left me with the
problem of changing names. Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary
Midgley, and Iris Murdoch all married, but Anscombe and Murdoch kept
their unmarried names—not only professionally but also in private life. Both
Foot and Midgley, however, took their husbands’ last names. As this group
biography reaches back to my subjects’ university years and even their
childhoods, I knew Foot would have to be Bosanquet before 1945 and
Midgley would have to be Scrutton before 1950. I hope to forestall confusion
by highlighting this here. One last word on this topic: I do use first names in
one particular (but recurring) context. I use them whenever writing about one
of my subjects and her mother or father or husband, or about her mother and
father—any two people sharing a last name. I switch then to first names.
 A NOTE TO AMERICAN READERS

A diverting instance of how Americans and Brits are “divided by a common

language” is the differing terminology they use to talk about formal—
especially higher—education. On top of some general differences in terms,
Oxford has a vocabulary all its own, which will be unknown to some
readers. I have prepared a short glossary, then, so that readers who find
themselves puzzling over a term can flip back to remind themselves what it
means.
College in Oxford usage refers to one of the constituent, semi-autonomous
institutions that make up the University. The University of Oxford is the sum
of its dozens of colleges, plus some facilities and administrative offices that
serve them all. In the mid-twentieth century, Oxford’s colleges were
considerably more autonomous than they are today. Still today, though, a
student wishing to study at Oxford applies to and is accepted by a college or
colleges, and faculty too are affiliated with particular colleges, though some
carry university-wide responsibilities. Though students are sometimes sent
out for instruction (“tutoring”—see below) to faculty from colleges other
than their own, the usual thing is for a student to be taught mainly by her
college’s own faculty. Elizabeth Anscombe was an alumna of St. Hugh’s
College.
First (or second, or . . . ) is short for “X-class degree” or “X-class marks.”
In final degree examinations at Oxford, students are placed in numerically
descending classes based on the quality of their exam performance. Getting a
first (at a university full of very bright people) is a mark of particular
distinction, both for the individual and for her college and tutors.
Going up means matriculating at Oxford (or Cambridge). Iris Murdoch and
Mary Midgley went up to Oxford (or even just “went up”) in 1939. The
reciprocal term is “went down.” They went down in 1942. If people get into
trouble at Oxford and are suspended or expelled, they are sent down (or, in a
revealing usage, “rusticated”).
Greats is a synecdoche for Oxford’s four-year, two-part degree course in
what is generally known as classics. Strictly speaking, “Greats” refers only
to the second half of the course, but is commonly used as a shorthand for the
whole. Greats is a longer course than most (most Oxford degrees take three
years). The full title is “Honour Moderations [or ‘Honour Mods,’ or just
‘Mods’] and Greats.” (The formal title is Latin: Literae humaniores, “more
humane letters.”) At the time my subjects were at Oxford, the first part of the
course (taking slightly under two years) was focused on classical languages
and literature, while the second part (taking slightly over two years) was
focused on ancient history and ancient and modern philosophy. The
curriculum has become more flexible in recent years.
Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity are the three terms in the Oxford academic
calendar. Michaelmas term runs from mid-October to mid-December, Hilary
term from mid-January to mid-March, and Trinity term from late April to late
June.
Paper refers to a written examination, whether for entrance or a degree.
Philippa Foot revised (not “reviewed” or “studied”) for her logic paper
(among others) at the end of her undergraduate career.
PPE is short for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, a multidisciplinary
degree introduced at Oxford in the 1920s.
Professor has historically meant something different in the United Kingdom
(and elsewhere in Europe) than in the United States. In the United States, it
refers to any fully credentialed, established member of the faculty of a
college or university (in traditional Oxbridge lingo, a “don”). UK usage is
shifting, but during the careers of my subjects, “Professor” meant the holder
of one of the few most distinguished positions at a university, carrying not
just higher pay and prestige but different responsibilities than those
shouldered by other faculty. Such positions often bear the name either of the
donor who endowed them or of some especially distinguished former holder
of the professorship. Elizabeth Anscombe was Professor of Philosophy at
Cambridge University from 1970 until her retirement.
Reading is the British equivalent of the American “majoring in.” Philippa
Foot read PPE at Oxford.
School refers to pre-university education, or to an institution providing this.
So, Iris Murdoch went to Badminton School, and Lady Anne Piper was one
of Mary Midgley’s school friends at Downe House. At the time, they were
schoolgirls. One more point: “public schools” in the United Kingdom are a
set of especially distinguished, wealthy private schools that have long served
as funnels toward Oxford and Cambridge (they are “public” in that they do
not draw solely from the children of a particular parish, religious
denomination, or profession). Richard Hare attended Rugby, one of the most
famous public schools.
Schools (short for “Examination Schools”) refers to a building on High
Street (“the High”) in Oxford where many lecture courses are given during
term, but can also refer to the degree examinations conducted there. The
building takes its name from this function.
Tutorial system (or, “tutorial and examination system”) refers to the
distinctive pedagogical system of the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford,
where it evolved. Term by term, students are assigned to tutors in the various
subfields compassed by their degree examinations. In (standardly) one-hour,
once-a-week sessions with each of their tutors, students present short essays
they have written on reading the tutor has assigned and receive live critique
of their work. These are often small-group sessions, but can be one-on-one.
In preparing for degree examinations, then, students examine some texts
intensively with their tutors, but also attend lectures in which faculty from
across the University give broad overviews of material beyond what students
can cover in tutorials. A student’s examination papers are read by faculty
other than her tutors, exerting quality control.
Viva is short for viva voce (“live oral”) examination, a follow-up
examination that used to be required when a student’s examination papers did
not make unarguably clear what class she should be in. Iris Murdoch
received a first without a viva.
 Chapter 1

Facts and Values

They say to me, how can you bear to be alive if everything is so cold and empty and
pointless? Well, at an academic level I think it is—but that doesn’t mean you can live
your life like that.
—Richard Dawkins, in The Guardian, October 3, 1998

NOTHING THE SAME

It was the newsreels that broke her open.

September 1945. The war was over, really over, at last. Philippa Foot and
her husband Michael had been in London through VJ Day, but now they were
back in the place that felt most like home to Philippa: Oxford. If they had
been hedging in their minds about the future, not wanting to hope too much or
too quickly—it was all right now.1
They had married as soon as their autumn plans had come together: a
Midsummer’s Day ceremony at the Caxton Hall register office in
Westminster. Philippa’s Oxford roommate Anne Cobbe stood up for her. It
wasn’t the grand wedding her parents would have chosen for their daughter,
but in the desperate excitement of looking forward again, no one judged. And
why wait? Philippa could only get so much time off during her final months at
Chatham House, and—frail though he still was—there was no guarantee
Michael wouldn’t have to report for a final stint in Army Intelligence before
being demobilized. They had a brief honeymoon in the West Country and a
short working holiday in Oxfordshire—Philippa teaching a Workers
Educational Association summer course—before returning to London to wait
out the summer, to pack, to think ahead. And now here they were: in a little
eighteenth-century house just outside the New College walls. It was
supposedly where Halley lived when he discovered his comet. Home.

1
 ♦♦♦♦
The preceding year had been a sickening, exhilarating ride: Michael captured
in France in August 1944; escaping only to be brutally retaken, sustaining a
broken skull and spine; exchanged to the Allies months later, his survival far
from certain. But survive he did, and he and Philippa were finally reunited in
late February, Philippa nursing him slowly back to health at his flat a few
blocks east of Victoria station. As it began to be possible to think beyond the
war, Philippa began inquiring about a discharge from her post so she and
Michael could return to Oxford. In 1942, she had been offered a place as a
graduate student at her undergraduate college, Somerville; the offer stood.
And Michael could finish his interrupted degree.
That spring, as Michael was rebuilding his strength—practically
relearning to walk—Philippa was doing four things at once: her day job,
assisting a research group on postwar economic reconstruction; caring for
Michael; applying for scholarships; planning for their wedding and beyond.
They were aware—the whole country was—of the first newspaper pictures
and newsreel footage from the Nazi concentration camps. But their minds and
days were so full, they had no time for what a growing chorus was calling a
moral duty: confronting the images from Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen.
♦♦♦♦
The cultural impact of the first newsreels from the concentration camps was
seismic. Nothing remotely like this had been shown to the British public
since the aftermath of the Great War. The Ministry of Information had not
permitted publication of graphic images during the war, to safeguard morale
but also to maintain public trust. The memory of Great War propaganda about
the “Rape of Belgium”—and the skepticism it later provoked—remained
sharp. In the case of the footage from the camps, there was even discussion
among journalists of whether it could be real. The sources on the ground
were authoritative, but: could the Nazis possibly have done this?2
To forestall disbelief, the British government sent a politically diverse
delegation of parliamentarians to Buchenwald on April 21. Most never fully
recovered from the experience. Footage from the delegation’s visit was the
source for all the newsreel coverage that came out at the end of April—the
most powerful of which was the Pathé production, German Atrocities,
narrated by Conservative MP Mavis Tate. The authentication provided by
images of Tate and other MPs, together with the empathetic connection she

2
and the camera operators encouraged between inmates and viewers (they are
“as you and I,” Tate said with emphasis) resulted not in disbelief but in a
generation-shaping experience. “Do believe me,” she said, “when I tell you
that the reality was indescribably worse than these pictures.” And viewers
did. Though some cinema proprietors worried that people would not stay
past the newsreels after viewing such horrific content, they did not suffer
economically from showing it. There were queues down the block for weeks.
And the newsreels remained in circulation far longer than the usual few days.
Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, saw the footage in London in mid-July, two-
and-a-half months after its initial release. Her reaction is typical of many
recorded in the popular press and in Mass Observation diaries at the time:
“Incredibly horrible. Beyond our wildest imaginations of atrocity and evil. I
had to come out before the end I was so upset.”3
♦♦♦♦
But between VE Day celebrations in London, honeymoon planning, and
preparing for the return to Oxford, Philippa didn’t look at the images of the
camps—really look at them, as her friend Iris Murdoch would say—until she
and Michael were settled in their new lodgings. Then one day she too went to
the cinema and took in the piles of bodies, the remains charred in ovens or
tangled in electrified wire, the emaciated survivors stumbling around in a
daze, the adolescents clutching the bowls of thin soup they’d been given,
flinching instinctively as anyone approached. Like so many others, she
emerged in shock.
She went afterward to Keble College to see her mentor, Donald
MacKinnon. There was no one whose counsel she valued more highly. They
had met routinely on her visits to Oxford since 1943. Now she and he sat
across from one another again, he in his battered armchair, she in the better
one, reserved for pupils and guests. He never had difficulty letting silence
linger, and he let it linger now. She said, “Nothing is ever going to be the
same again.” He looked back at her. “No. Nothing is ever going to be the
same.”4
As they spoke, and as she walked the gloomy passageway back from
MacKinnon’s rooms in one of Keble’s neo-Gothic towers, Philippa Foot was
coming to a resolution. She was interested in lots of things. In her renewed
application to Somerville, she’d sketched a project titled, “The Idea of

3
Substance in Locke and Kant.” But now there was something she wanted to
say about ethics, too.
Nothing in the moral philosophy of her time was adequate to what she’d
just seen. And if philosophy was to have any point, it had to be able to speak
to that horror.

FACTS AND OPINIONS

The trouble with the moral philosophy of Foot’s time—though she didn’t
have words for this yet—was that it was in thrall to a picture, a questionable
picture of what’s real and unreal. The picture is one that goes back centuries
in the modern Western imagination: back to the early-modern period and the
scientific revolution. It had been given especially clear and forceful
expression in the interwar years by a group of Austrian intellectuals calling
themselves the Vienna Circle—and by a young Oxford don who went to
Vienna and came back with the zeal of a convert. And it has not faded away.
It is all around us: the dichotomy between facts and values.
♦♦♦♦
Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development sponsors an assessment of educational outcomes in 79
countries. The most recent results, from the 2018 assessment, were released
at the end of 2019. The results are examined from every angle by participant
countries, looking for grounds to celebrate or to reform. One detail from the
latest assessment, though, generated an unusual amount of attention, under
headlines like: “Only 9% of 15-year-olds can distinguish between fact and
opinion.”5 Forbes, The New York Times, and other high-profile publications
ran fretful pieces, highlighting the result. The nine-percent figure is an
international average. In the United Kingdom and United States, students
fared somewhat better: 11.5 percent and 13.5 percent, respectively. The
distinction is, after all, routinely taught in their schools. But it is evidently
hard to teach effectively. Perhaps the problem isn’t with students or teachers,
but with the distinction.
As typically presented in lesson plans and on handouts (many of which are
available online), the concept of a fact fuses truth and verifiability. “A fact
refers to something true or real, which is backed by evidence, documentation,
etc.” “A fact is something that is true, real information. It can be proven.”

4
Note: “fact” is a “success term.” There are no false facts, however
compelling the evidence. Facts are true, by definition.6
Other widely circulating definitions vary little from these. Some tie facts
to “objective reality” or assert that facts are not debatable. But these seem to
be elaborations on the definitions already given. To say that facts are
objectively real is to say that they are (1) true and (2) can be confirmed by
different observers, despite their differences. They are like objects, there to
be seen.
There is more variety among definitions of the contrast term, “opinion.”
Opinions, some authors say, are matters of feeling: “an opinion is an
expression of a person’s feelings that cannot be proven.” Sometimes, though,
they speak instead of “personal belief” or a “personal view” or a
“perception.” But there is a shared thought across these definitions: opinions
are expressions of subjectivity, the distinctive perspectives of individuals.
Opinions, more than one author writes, are expressions of “bias.” This
contrasts with the objectivity, the perspective-independence, of facts.7
Where did the distinction come from?
♦♦♦♦
A distinction between differently credentialed thoughts—grades of belief—
goes back to Plato at least. The fact/opinion distinction, though, is more
recent. It emerged in the interwar years in America, in connection with a new
movement to promote “critical thinking” as part of responsible citizenship.
Critical thinking was supposed to be a shield against advertising and
propaganda—a newly salient concern after the experience of the first World
War and especially after the appearance of Edward Bernays’ cheerfully
amoral how-to manuals, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and
Propaganda (1928). Drawing on his experiences producing wartime and
postwar propaganda for the United States—and on the theoretical apparatus
of Walter Lippman’s 1922 Public Opinion—Bernays set himself up as the
first public-relations consultant. In his books, he explained how groups can
be manipulated by leading them to associate products or organizations with
psychologically potent symbols. (It is perhaps relevant that he was Sigmund
Freud’s nephew twice over.) The books were arresting, attractive, shocking.
They demanded a response. Educators and educational theorists complied.
In 1940, Horace Morse and George McCune first published their
“Selected Items for the Testing of Study Skills,” later retitled “Selected Items

5
for the Testing of Study Skills and Critical Thinking.”8 Among other things,
this instrument asked students to distinguish facts from opinions. It may have
been the first of its kind; it was certainly the first to become influential. The
linkage between the fact/opinion distinction and critical thought remains in
fact-versus-opinion lessons today, even when the words “critical thinking”
aren’t used: “[I]t is . . . imperative that students are able to unravel the
threads of what is true from what is mere belief if they are to successfully
navigate the deluge of media they will encounter in their lifetimes. Whether
on the news, in advertising, or a history book, distinguishing between what is
fact and what is opinion is crucial to becoming an autonomous person with
the critical abilities necessary to avoid being manipulated easily.”9 To be
able to distinguish opinion from fact is to be ready for responsible
citizenship. To mistake opinion for fact is to be duped, to take smoke and
mirrors—spin, propaganda—for reality.
There is an obvious point to such a distinction. In a polarized and
manipulative media environment (nothing new under the sun), there is clear
value in teaching people to seek and identify shareable starting points—
claims that opposed parties can be reasonably expected to acknowledge—
and to distinguish these from plausible conjectures, competing
interpretations, and outright propaganda.10 However difficult to achieve—in
courtrooms, in journalism, or in live debate—greater objectivity is a valid
goal.
The fact/opinion distinction as usually presented to children, though, is a
bundle of confusions. For starters, neither part of the definition of “fact” is
actually used as a criterion by children doing their exercises. Recall, facts
are standardly defined as truths (1) that can be proven (2). The “truths” part
of that definition is idle, though, because the only way to assess what’s true is
by considering grounds for believing it. There is no such thing as verifying a
claim and then checking to see if it’s true. So truth isn’t really a criterion.
The real criterion is verifiability. Or it should be.
Curriculum authors seldom say much about what counts as adequate
verification. Perhaps this is wise, as anything they said would embroil them
in old and difficult debates. Is a philosophical argument verification? How
about a mathematical proof? Inference to the simplest explanation?
Encouraging early experimental results? The testimony of a trustworthy
witness? Anything they said about this would inevitably count as, well,
opinion. So just as with truth, these authors make no real use of the idea of

6
verification, turning instead to linguistic tests that distinguish fact-type
statements from non-fact-type statements by the kinds of adjectives they use.
So children aren’t taught to consider the merits of claims, but to judge them
by how they are expressed.11
This brings us to the tests themselves. Numerous authors supply helpful
lists of “clue words” or “indicator words” that readers can use to distinguish
facts and opinions in the field—like guidebooks for birders. One tells
children to watch for adjectives related to “quantity, size, age, shape, color,
origin, material”—“information about something that can be proven.” These
are the marks of the common fact. The wild opinion, by contrast, may be
recognized by these signs: adjectives like “beautiful,” “ugly,” “best,”
“worst,” “expensive,” “tired,” “yummy,” or “gross.” All describe “how you
feel about something.”12 Or here’s another, even more revealing list of “clue
words” for opinion statements: “should, think, best, worst, good, right,
wrong, better, believe, feel, character trait words.” Looking at these lists,
and at the sorting exercises that accompany them, it is clear the conclusion
children are supposed to draw. Lesson plans often start out with easy
samples, to help students pick up the distinction. Opinions are statements
like, “the sun is pretty,” “the cake was delicious,” or “Friday is the best day
of the week.” But the application is plain: any evaluative statement is an
opinion, no matter how well-grounded: “Abraham Lincoln was eloquent”;
“She’s in better shape than I am”; “It is wrong to deliberately kill the
innocent.”
To believe this, though, is to believe that there is no point in reasoning
about evaluative matters—conflating distinctions between well-grounded
and poorly grounded, evaluative and non-evaluative, real and unreal. To
believe this is to be captive to a picture. On this picture, judgments of good
and bad, better and worse, should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, are all
mere subjective responses, like appetite or nausea. (No one reasons about
whether their nausea is well-grounded.)13 On this picture, nothing counts as
getting an evaluation right, because there’s nothing for evaluations to get
right. On this picture, values can never be facts.

THE BILLIARD-BALL UNIVERSE

This is the picture Foot was resisting, not yet realizing what it was, as she
tried to process what she had seen at the cinema. Again, it is an old picture,

7
first emerging in the early-modern period.
It began with the transition in early-modern natural philosophy (or, as we
now call it, “science”), away from Aristotle’s picture of the natural world.
Aristotle too had a “picture” in the sense in which I’m using the word: a set
of background assumptions, seldom explicitly formulated, that shapes and
constrains our intellectual imagination.14 To bend the metaphor slightly,
pictures like this frame our thought.
As scientists and historians alike are starting to appreciate, Aristotle was
an empirical researcher of the first rank.15 But he thought very differently
about the order of nature than moderns reflexively do. We tend to think and
frame our theories in terms of inert material bodies acted on by outside
forces. Our paradigm, since the early-modern period, has been billiard balls
on a table. Aristotle, by contrast, was a biologist first to last. Even when
doing what he called physics (by which he meant the study of nature in
general; physis means “nature”), and especially when doing ethics or
political science, he thought in terms of organisms, like plants.
Plants too are material bodies. But the material is alive. It begins as a seed
or an embryo and then, if conditions are right, it develops in a self-directed
way until it reaches maturity and reproduces itself. Eventually it diminishes
and dies, and its material is incorporated into other living beings. Lots of
things can interrupt the process along the way. But that’s the normal
progression: what will happen, if (as we still say) “nature takes its course.”
Impressed with the explanatory power of this pattern, Aristotle generalized it
and used it to interpret all natural phenomena: everything in nature, he
thought, is somewhere along an arc of self-directed development from
immaturity to maturity to senescence to death. He thus says that heavy bodies
are trying to reach the center of the earth—which sounds absurd to modern
ears. (We still say, “the plant is reaching toward the sun,” which doesn’t
sound absurd. We are still thus far Aristotelians.) Aristotle’s natural
philosophy is a case study in a compelling pattern of explanation being
turned into a paradigm. To a man with a hammer, the proverb goes,
everything looks like a nail. To Aristotle, after grasping the pattern of a self-
directed life cycle, everything looked somewhat like a tomato plant.
The picture increasingly adopted by the natural philosophers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and handed down to us, is very different.
It pictures material reality—the stuff of this world—as inert, not directing
itself anywhere or trying to achieve anything. It sits motionless (or continues

8
in its present motion) until something external imparts energy to it—like a
cue stick striking a billiard ball. The world is matter in motion, impelled
from without by external forces.
♦♦♦♦
There were multiple motives for the formation of the new picture. There was,
first, the suffocating orthodoxy of late-medieval and early-modern university
culture, which had long since abandoned the fearless disputation and
visionary system-building of a Thomas Aquinas in favor of unquestioning
defense of a few approved texts—including, ironically, Thomas’s own.16
But resentment at oppressive university cultures was not the only motive to
reevaluate Aristotle’s authority. There was also the European discovery of
the Americas. This immediately rendered every world map obsolete. But just
as importantly, it turned up biological and anthropological phenomena
unknown to Aristotle and his medieval followers, making everything these
authors had written seem parochial. What authority could a philosopher have,
whose theories took no account of the New World? Meanwhile, Gutenberg’s
press lowered the barriers to authors putting their ideas before readers and
lowered the barriers to readers having a look. With the moveable-type press
spewing out hundreds of millions of volumes in the sixteenth century alone,
the cacophony of new voices was impossible to ignore. Michel de
Montaigne’s reaction in the late sixteenth century is emblematic: “What do I
know?” he asked. (Precious little, he concluded.) Under these conditions,
fewer and fewer intellectuals were willing to put their faith in an author who
had been dead for nearly two thousand years. An anti-Aristotelianism began
to take hold among Europe’s intellectual elite, equal and opposite to the
dogmatic Aristotelianism of the universities. A vacuum was created, for new
pictures to fill.17
As the intellectuals of Europe abandoned its universities, where did they
go? For this partly explains the picture they embraced. These were men of
the world, mostly: diplomats, doctors, the leisured rich, soldiers of fortune.
Many were, like the artists of the high Renaissance and the Baroque, under
the patronage of queens, kings, and lesser nobles. Many, too, began to band
together in informal societies outside the universities to share and test their
ideas. Even when they did not explicitly organize, they were better known to
one another than any group of innovators could have been in an earlier age,
thanks to the culture of print.

9
 These worldly figures readily embraced Bacon’s dictum that knowledge is
power. From their positions close to power, they saw knowledge as a way of
manipulating the world to human ends, “for the . . . relief of man’s estate.”18
If one wishes to manipulate the world, matters are simpler if the world is not
bent on fulfilling its own, conflicting ends. But there are clearer motives to
the new, “mechanical” picture of nature in an idea we encountered earlier,
looking at fact-versus-opinion lessons: objectivity.
In the cacophony of voices that was the new culture of print, some reacted
like Montaigne: with a genial skepticism toward all the competing claims
being urged on them like samples at a farmer’s market. But for men of the
world seeking power, or for those like Descartes who simply shared
Aristotle’s desire to understand? Skepticism was unsatisfactory. They sought
instead a means—a method—for transcending conflicting impressions and
interpretations: a method for attaining objectivity.
It is a familiar thought that the method of hypothesis and experiment helps
us pursue objectivity. When different observers replicate one another’s
results, they bring us nearer to descriptions of the world that are not
perspective-dependent: descriptions that can be shared by all. If lots of
observers, from lots of perspectives, see the same thing, that suggests that it’s
there for anyone to see—that it’s objectively real.
But this was a thought with momentum. If one’s aim is to produce
perspective-independent descriptions of the world, why not try to eliminate
the human perspective entirely, describing the world in ways that make no
reference to how things look or sound or smell or taste or feel—to anyone?
One might, say, identify features of the world that correlate with and seem to
prompt color perceptions—is this dress blue and black or gold and white?—
but which can be described without reference to color. This was the next step
in objectivity: striving to eliminate human subjectivity entirely, describing
the world in ways that would make sense to intelligent bats.
So early-modern natural philosophers, starting with Galileo, embarked on
a program of banishing from scientific discourse references to qualitative
aspects of human experience: colors, flavors, smells, sounds, and so forth.
They began to distinguish such “secondary qualities” from “primary
qualities” (number, shape, size, position, motion) and to try to produce
descriptions of the world entirely in terms of the latter. What these primary
qualities have in common, besides being less directly and obviously tied to
sensation, is that they are readily quantifiable. Thus the ideal of

10
mathematization joined the ideal of experimentation and that of applying
science for the relief of the human estate, all three tied in different ways to
the overriding ideal of objectivity—a leading theme in Shakespeare’s great
tragedies, the obsession of the age.*
♦♦♦♦
What does this have to do with ethics, though—with values? Just this:
whether they intended it or not (Bacon, anyway, seems to have welcomed the
result), proponents of the distinction between primary and secondary
qualities ended up excluding more than just colors and smells from the
language of science. They also excluded all talk of purposive movement, of
natural goal-directedness, of nature taking its course (or having one).
The result was overdetermined. As we’ve seen, a whole generation of
intellectuals had become reflexively anti-Aristotelian. In 1686, Leibniz—like
a democratic socialist in McCarthy’s America—felt the need to defend his
integrity after making the least use of an Aristotelian notion, protesting that he
was not an obscurantist, that he had “devoted much time to experiments in
physics and to the demonstrations of geometry . . . .”19 But nothing was more
intimately associated with Aristotle’s thought than natural teleology (goal-
directedness). Moreover, goal-directedness was hard to capture in the now-
preferred language of mathematics. It’s difficult framing a mathematical
description of billiard balls moving about on a table. The thing is possible,
though, with enough ingenuity (and especially with the aid of the new
calculus). But a mathematical description of a bunch of entities striving
toward their cross-cutting goals, which they will achieve to the extent that
conflicts and unforeseen accidents don’t occur? It’s not that you couldn’t use
numbers to describe such a scene. (Contemporary social scientists do.) But
the Aristotelian picture is far more resistant to mathematization. Meanwhile,
a thrilling prospect had come into view, thanks to the work of Galileo,
Kepler, and others: the prospect of a comprehensive mathematical
description of nature. This description excluded talk of natural goals and
purposes.
This created two problems for ethics. First, the received theory of ethics
was Aristotle’s, and it was bound up with his picture of the natural world.
According to Aristotle, there is an ideal for human life, a state in which we
realize our natural potential. The task of ethics is to describe this ideal as far
as possible (Aristotle himself says that precise mathematical representation

11
of the ideal is impossible). Having grasped the ideal, rational animals can
direct themselves toward it. In the prevailing anti-Aristotelian atmosphere of
the early-modern period, that theory, with its attendant vocabulary of virtues
(qualities that help people realize the ideal) and vices (qualities that frustrate
its realization), was no longer acceptable and had to be replaced by
something new.20
At a deeper level, the exclusion of goal-directedness from the new picture
of nature made the task of replacing Aristotle’s ethics daunting—maybe even
impossible. On the new picture, the world consists of inert matter. For
simplicity’s sake (that is, for the sake of mathematization), this matter is
treated as all-of-a-kind. It is a world of gobs of undifferentiated stuff, moving
or altering its movement only in response to impulsion from without. Varying
quantities and arrangements of this stuff are set in a field (the universe),
where they occasionally collide and transfer energy to one another according
to invariant, mathematically representable laws. Value is not part of this
description of the world.
I said earlier that Aristotle made a paradigm—a picture—of his favorite
explanatory pattern. He looked at the movements of the heavens or a falling
stone and saw the same sort of process at work as in the life cycle of a
tomato plant. Early moderns, reacting against all things Aristotelian and
desperately seeking objectivity in a context of endemic pluralism, came up
with a new pattern of explanation: billiard balls, the lawlike interaction of
inert bodies in space. Like Aristotle’s pattern, this analogy had tremendous
explanatory power. Whatever simplifications it involved, it brought
astonishing clarity to human understanding in astronomy, in physics generally,
and beyond. Kepler’s judgment was bold but understandable when he wrote
that God had waited 6000 years for someone to perceive His work.21
Moderns, too, made a paradigm out of their new pattern. To a man with a
hammer, everything looks like a nail. It is an easy transition from “this is a
helpful pattern of explanation” to “this is an all-competent pattern of
explanation.” Likewise, it is an easy transition from “I have excluded flavors
from my descriptions of nature” to “flavors are not part of nature.” As
powerful and fruitful as the new pattern was, and as excited as European
intellectuals became about it, it was understandable that they would come to
equate the elements of a deliberately simplified description of nature with
what nature really is.

12
 Just as it was always a stretch making Aristotle’s pattern cover the
movements of the heavens, it has been a stretch making the pattern that
emerged during the modern scientific revolution cover plant and animal life,
and especially the lives of human beings: their psychology, their politics. But
set that thought aside. My immediate point is this: moderns took their pattern
for a paradigm. They took their theoretical simplification for reality. When
they had done that, then value became something unreal. A picture began to
emerge.

THE DAWKINS SUBLIME

The epigraph to this chapter is a quote from evolutionary biologist and

popular science writer Richard Dawkins. It is a crystalline expression of the
picture Foot needed to escape.
The picture was not quite complete at the end of the seventeenth century.
Most of its elements were in place, but one more was needed to give it the
power it would exert on Foot and her contemporaries. It is a picture that
remains potent today in the Western imagination. But as is characteristic of
such pictures, it typically operates below the level of conscious affirmation.
As Charles Taylor puts it, “we have trouble often thinking ourselves outside
of [such pictures], even as an imaginative exercise,” precisely because they
are the background to our thought.22 Indeed, this picture can be especially
difficult for those captive to it to recognize as a picture. That is because this
picture includes the idea that it is not a picture, that people who think in
terms of this picture have forsworn all pictures and are simply confronting
reality as it is. I call this conceit “the Dawkins sublime.”
♦♦♦♦
Only a few years after the 1748 discovery of the remains of Pompeii,
Edmund Burke gave a name to the aesthetic experience many Europeans had,
contemplating Pompeii’s final hours. Why was it so fascinating? Why did it
become such an arresting subject for engravers and poets? Strangely but
truly, the contemplation of something overwhelming, even horrifying—
something lethally powerful and hard to wrap one’s mind around—can
produce . . . pleasure? Not, of course, if one is directly exposed to the power
of whatever it is. But if one is merely contemplating it and not in immediate
danger? Consider the characteristic thrill many people feel looking down

13
from a cliff edge (not clinging to a root, but from behind a wall!), or looking
out into a blizzard from inside a warm cabin, or looking at magazine pictures
of the wreck of the Titanic strewn across the Atlantic seabed, under the
crushing weight of two miles of black water. People seek out these
experiences. Burke labeled this phenomenon—both the emotional reaction
and the objects that provoke it—“the sublime.” Here is how he articulates it:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is
to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible
objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the
sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is
capable of feeling.”23
It is hard to know how much the late eighteenth century’s and early
nineteenth century’s hunger for the sublime—in gothic novels, in the art of
Joseph Wright of Derby (who produced more than 30 paintings of Vesuvius),
in Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and so on—was prompted by
having a word for it. Whether Burke was shaping the Zeitgeist or carried
along by it, this much is clear: the sublime was one of the principal aesthetic
preoccupations of the next several generations. And throughout the nineteenth
century, as Westerners came to terms with new developments in geology and
biology, the universe at large came to seem to many like the ruins of Pompeii:
sublime. Westerners began to describe in elevated if melancholy terms the
human condition in a lethal and indifferent universe. Alfred Tennyson was
crying out in grief when he gave these words to personified Sorrow:
“The stars,” she whispers, “blindly run;
A web is wov’n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun;

And all the phantom, Nature, stands—

With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,—
A hollow form with empty hands.”24

♦♦♦♦
The rest of In Memoriam traces Tennyson’s re-ascent from those depths. But
this passage articulates the remaining feature needed to complete the picture I
am talking about.

14
 Note the language: blindness, death, hollowness, emptiness. This
vocabulary, endlessly repeated by authors from the nineteenth century
onward, became a trope. The world is cold, pitiless, bereft. But however
grim it sounds, we are also recognizably in the domain of the sublime: there
is exaltation in beholding the bleakness of it all, or in having steeled oneself
to look without flinching. Here is Matthew Arnold:
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain . . . .”25

It is comprehensible that people would take comfort in one another in the

face of a gloomy prospect. It is comprehensible too, especially for graduates
of the type of public school that both Tennyson and Arnold attended, that
ideas of bravery and manly self-mastery would become associated with
views like this. Thus Steven Jay Gould: “[I]t’s a tough life and if you can
delude yourself into thinking that there’s . . . some warm fuzzy meaning to it
all, it’s enormously comforting.”26 Some of us, though, are man enough not to
delude ourselves. Partly on these grounds, bravery and self-mastery have
become powerfully associated with scientific inquiry in the modern
imagination.
There is a tension in such views, though. Take Arnold’s lines: “Ah, love,
let us be true/To one another! for the world, which seems/To lie before us
like a land of dreams,/ . . . Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light . . . .”
Ah love, let us love one another, for there really is no love. Either the
speaker and his beloved are exempted from the general picture of the world
he is presenting, or he is contradicting himself. So too in the Dawkins quote
at the outset. How can he bear to go on, he says people ask him, “if
everything is so cold and empty and pointless?” Conceding that that’s just the
way it is, he allows that he doesn’t—can’t—live “like that.” He goes on to
explain how doing science gives his life meaning, all the while maintaining
that it can’t, really.
The tension comes from the fact that the Dawkins sublime is grounded in
the billiard-ball picture of the universe. Purpose, value, love, meaning—
these are not primary qualities. They are unreal. This is one of the primary

15
inspirations for the Dawkins sublime. The world is devoid of value, value is
all in our heads, and understanding the world is like gazing into an abyss. As
Steven Weinberg writes, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the
more it also seems pointless.” But ah, love, let us face this with whatever
dignity we can, though notions like dignity are mere projections of ours. So
Weinberg continues, “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very
few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it
some of the grace of tragedy.”27 Or, put in terms of the language-arts lessons
that so many schools now use: character-trait words like “courage” are clue
words for groundless opinions, mere subjective likes and dislikes; but it is
courageous to think critically.
♦♦♦♦
Philippa Foot had studied a version of this picture—officially hostile to any
real basis for ethical distinctions, though contemptuous of anyone cowardly
enough to deny it—in the modern philosophy portion of her undergraduate
curriculum. On the theories she had encountered as a student, moral
judgments merely expressed the approval or disapproval of the speaker.
But now she had seen the newsreels, had seen what camp commander
Josef Kramer and his underlings had done at Bergen-Belsen. As she stepped
through the Keble College gates onto Parks Road, she knew what she wanted
to say, if only she could find the words: that what the Nazis had done was
wicked. As she put it years later, looking back on the moment of realization:
“this is not just a personal decision . . . or an expression of disapproval.
There is something objective here.”28
She wouldn’t have to find the words alone. She had friends.

* Consider how Othello and Lear both come to disaster when subjective biases lead them to
misinterpret what they see and hear: Othello through jealousy, Lear through a pusillanimous
hunger for affirmation. Or how Hamlet sets up an experiment to determine if he should trust the
apparition he saw on the ramparts of Elsinore. Or how Macbeth, once he embarks on his
campaign of murder, is too blinded by fear and ambition to seriously question his interpretation of
the witches’ prophecy. The same theme is present in Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About
Nothing, and elsewhere.

16
 Chapter 2

Oxford in Wartime

NUMBER TWO, BRADMORE ROAD

Philippa Foot only really met Iris Murdoch as they were each preparing for
their final examinations in June 1942. Their shared tutor, Donald MacKinnon,
suggested to Murdoch that “Philippa might appreciate a friendly visit.”1
Housebound and discouraged—however good a front she was showing—
Foot (then Bosanquet) did need company. Still, it wasn’t the introduction she
would have chosen. Ever self-conscious about whether she truly belonged at
Oxford, and intimidated by the older, more glamorous Murdoch, Bosanquet
wouldn’t have chosen for their first real conversation to happen while her
torso was encased in plaster.
Bosanquet had been a frail child, contracting abdominal tuberculosis
around age 8. The prescription she got was a year sleeping in the open air.
So summer and winter that year, she slept on a balcony outside the nursery
window. This was in Kirkleatham, in northernmost North Yorkshire; icy
winds swept in from the nearby coast through the winter months. Whether or
not this had any real effect on Bosanquet’s TB, it certainly toughened her. But
this hard-earned toughness didn’t stop her from being nervous about her
place at Somerville or from fretting about the quality of her work.
Now her back was acting up at the worst possible moment. Was it a
recurrence of TB? Some other sort of spinal inflammation? Given
Bosanquet’s history, her doctors were taking no chances, and ordered her to
spend the summer in a spinal cast. Her tutors had agreed to the extraordinary
measure of teaching her in her lodgings, and the Principal of Somerville had
arranged for her exams to be administered there, too. But she was seeing
almost no one apart from her tutors, her landlady Mrs. Muir, and her
roommate and best friend Anne Cobbe. She couldn’t go to lectures. She

17
couldn’t visit the Bodleian. She couldn’t even go to the University Parks
(only a block away!) to take her mind off her endless revisions.
MacKinnon often nudged people to support one another. Murdoch
wouldn’t otherwise have looked in on Bosanquet. Their most significant
interaction until then had been when Bosanquet opposed Murdoch’s
candidacy for the presidency of the Junior Common Room the year before.
Bosanquet had nominated someone else, fearing that the politically
enthusiastic (i.e., loudly Communist) Murdoch would be a nuisance, calling
too many meetings. Murdoch didn’t take it hard, but still, they hardly knew
each other. It wouldn’t have made sense for her to pay Bosanquet a visit.
Murdoch revered MacKinnon, though, so she went.
It took Murdoch longer to gather a bouquet of wildflowers than to walk
from her digs in Park Town to the church-like, neo-Gothic door of Mrs.
Muir’s house, 2 Bradmore Road. She knocked, went up to Bosanquet’s room,
and sat down beside her. So began a friendship that would last the rest of
their lives.

MARY BEATRICE SCRUTTON GOES UP

In the late 1930s, Oxford’s women’s colleges (or “societies”) may have been
the most selective undergraduate institutions in the world. A number of
factors conspired toward this result. The prestige long associated with an
Oxbridge education was compounded at Oxford because they now granted
degrees to women, while Cambridge still did not. Oxford changed its policy
in 1920, the same year British women received the right to vote. Cambridge
did not follow suit until 1948. It made Oxford a particularly attractive
destination for women.
Not that Oxford’s policy of granting degrees to women was
uncontroversial. In 1927, fretting that the University was acquiring a
reputation as “socialistic, weak in athletics, and be-womaned,”2 the ancient
house of Congregation (Oxford’s chief administrative gathering) capped the
number of women undergraduates at 840 (out of a total population of over
4,000). It stipulated further that, although the overall quota could rise if any
new women’s societies were founded, the ratio of men to women could not
fall below four to one. A quota remained in force until the late 1950s.3 So an
English schoolgirl in the late 1930s seeking an elite degree was competing
with candidates from across the empire for one of about 250 places a year.

18
 If it was difficult to gain admission to any of Oxford’s women’s colleges,
it was particularly difficult to get into Somerville.
Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall were Oxford’s first women’s
colleges, opening together in 1879. From the first, Somerville had both the
more scholarly and the more radical reputation. Each of Oxford’s four
women’s colleges was founded by educational reformers, radicals in their
way. Nevertheless, differences in charter led over time to differences in
reputation and atmosphere. Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) was officially
Anglican, and built a reputation as a socially respectable destination for
bright young women, making the idea of an Oxford education less threatening
to some prospective students and their families. Somerville by contrast was
pointedly non-sectarian (there was a minor furor in the early 1930s when an
Old Somervillian gave a large donation for a college chapel; what could a
Somerville chapel be like?), and as proudly bluestocking as any place on
earth. Being non-sectarian, it also drew a wider pool of applicants, making
the competition for places even fiercer and reinforcing a culture of academic
striving. As a popular verse of the 1930s had it, “Lady Margaret Hall for
Ladies, St. Hugh’s for Girls, St. Hilda’s for Wenches, Somerville for
Women.” (This was certainly unfair to St. Hugh’s and St. Hilda’s.)* There
were other versions, one of which concluded, “Somerville for Freaks.” With
the elite women of the empire concentrated into a few colleges, and one
established as the most rigorous of the group, it was no surprise that
Somerville students performed exceptionally. By 1945, the Principals of all
four women’s colleges were Old Somervillians.
♦♦♦♦
Somerville’s application process was certainly the most daunting. Anyway,
Mary Scrutton was daunted. Women on both sides of her family had been
attending university for a generation, and she was expected to go. Her parents
were older than most, and her father was a reasonably well-paid vicar in the
Church of England. So they were able—with assistance—to send their two
children to good boarding schools and then to university (Mary’s older
brother Hugh attended Cambridge, like their father). Sitting her entrance
examinations in December 1937, it seemed to Mary as if her whole life was
riding on the results. She took the exams in a “state of panic.”4
In the late 1930s, every applicant for admission to Oxford University had
to sit for two sets of written examinations. Responsions, the University-wide

19
examinations, required candidates to show basic competence in two or three
languages—one of them Latin or Greek—and either mathematics or natural
science. But there were also college-specific examinations, because every
undergraduate at Oxford must be affiliated with one of its dozens of federated
colleges or societies. The college-specific exams consisted mainly of a set of
papers linked to each applicant’s intended field of study. But there was also
the “general paper,” which removed applicants from their strongholds of
special preparation and exposed their capacity (or incapacity) to think
seriously on their feet. The prompts for the general paper rewarded a
philosophic temperament: an interest in stepping back and looking hard at
some concept or piece of conventional wisdom, or in coming at some
familiar fact from an unusual direction. Many actual general-paper prompts
have been published: “When if ever is it justifiable to break a law?”
“Consider the suggestion that the history of a mountain is simpler than the
history of a mouse.” To her good fortune, Scrutton had a history teacher at her
preparatory school, Downe House, who knew what the paper was like and
prepared her students with prompts like “Nature is too green and badly
lighted. Discuss.”
All this was intimidating enough. Somerville added a layer. The College
examinations were administered off-site. Afterward, candidates who had
impressed their examiners were invited to Oxford for an interview, a chance
for College staff to assess temperament and fit. The atmosphere conjures
itself: the nerves, the posturing, the emotional extremes. Nina (Mabey)
Bawden, who went up in 1943, describes the experience:
I went to Oxford in my school uniform . . . and was ashamed when I arrived at Somerville and
found that the other girls waiting outside the Principal’s room were wearing what I thought of as
‘best’ clothes . . . . They all seemed to know each other, they all came from private boarding-
schools, and as soon as I heard them and saw them I knew it had been presumptuous folly to
imagine I might be allowed to join this exclusive society. . . . I was last on the list that morning. The
other girls went into the Principal’s room one by one, and, when their interviews were over, clung
to each other. ‘Oh my dear,’ they wailed, ‘wasn’t she terrifying? Of course we haven’t an
earthly.’5

Trying to imagine “the gorgon who clearly lay in wait,” Bawden steeled
herself and went in, but found only a “small, rosy woman, beaming at me
with a grandmotherly air.” Principal Helen Darbishire coaxed Bawden with
small talk until she got her onto a topic that excited her: the condition of the
working class in Wales. Darbishire listened interestedly for several minutes,

20
gave Bawden a chocolate, and said, “Dear child, we will be happy to have
you.” Somerville wanted the Nina Bawdens, not the “healthy young mares” in
line ahead of her.
Scrutton’s experience five years earlier was similar. She sank into
despondency as she waited, listening to “a smart girl who kept telling us all
how much she had impressed the interview panel by explaining to them just
what made Keats choose the words ‘blushful Hippocrene’ in the ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’.” “I wished he hadn’t chosen them,” she thought, and “expected
nothing but disaster.”6 But like Bawden, she would be surprised. The
Somerville staff had a good idea what kind of student they wanted.
Particularly impressed with Scrutton’s general paper, they admitted her to
study Classics and offered her a scholarship.7
♦♦♦♦
For all Somerville’s selectivity, its students did suffer some deficits relative
to their male peers. The most distinguished and best-resourced public
schools in Britain—Eton, Rugby, Winchester—were male-only. These
schools were particularly strong, and schools open to women comparatively
weak, in classical languages: one of the prerequisites for admission to the
University and the foundation of the famous classics course for which
Scrutton had applied. This was no accident. These schools’ curricula were
built to propel students toward Oxford—and, indeed, toward classics.
“Greats” (Literae humaniores, or Lit. hum.) was by 1938 a standard
pathway to academic careers in several fields: philosophy, ancient history,
archeology. More importantly, it was a long-standing portal into the male-
dominated fields of politics and civil service. Preparing colonial
administrators and other civil servants had been Benjamin Jowett’s guiding
aim when he revised the curriculum in the late nineteenth century.8
Lit. hum. remained a prestige degree well into the twentieth century. It
took four years, one year longer than a typical Oxford degree. Beginning with
just under two years of advanced study in classical languages and literature
(Honour Moderations, or “Mods”), it then pivoted to two-plus years of
ancient history and ancient and modern philosophy. Though Greats was a
classics course, it was also intended from its medieval origins as a general
course in humane letters—explaining why it was understood as broad
preparation for civic life.

21
 Pupils at elite boys’ schools received years of preparation translating into
and out of classical Greek and Latin; Greats picked up where their school
syllabi left off. Few women received comparable preparation. When
Scrutton started at Downe House, Greek wasn’t even available. A
particularly good classics teacher, seeing how well Scrutton and a few others
were progressing in Latin, offered to teach them Greek. The girls squeezed it
into a corner of their schedules. It thus became possible—just—for Scrutton
to aspire to read Greats at Oxford, a course which otherwise would have
been closed to her, as it would have been closed to most of her teachers.
There is almost a parable here about the subtle ways in which gatekeeping
works. Gatekeepers could suppose that they are simply insisting on baseline
competence in relevant subjects. Isn’t it obvious to make Greek and Latin
prerequisites for a classics course? But in fact, given the way the world is,
the effect of insisting on that background is to cut off opportunities for people
who might be capable of impressive work, if only a path were open to them
that didn’t impose those conditions.
The unwitting assumption that all Oxford undergraduates had gone to
school at someplace like Eton affected students outside the Greats
curriculum, too. Bawden read “Modern Greats” a few years later, a
concentration explicitly designed for students interested in the same kind of
broad-based humanistic education but who had never seriously studied
Greek. Even she found that her philosophy tutor didn’t know where to begin
with her. “He had not taught girls before,” she wrote, “nor any student of
either sex from a state grammar school, and could not believe I had never
learned Greek. He seemed convinced . . . that I must be concealing this
simple and fundamental skill out of some mysterious modesty.”9
However temperamentally fretful she was, and however academically
disadvantaged, Scrutton was always willing to work. She had first thought
she would do her degree in English literature, but a teacher advised her to
study something she wouldn’t study on her own; she took this to heart.
Somerville had admitted her on the condition that she get remedial coaching
in ancient languages—Oxford coaching—before coming up the following
autumn. Scrutton had already started extra languages work the preceding
summer, preparing for her entrance examinations. So she and brilliant-but-
imperious Old Somervillian Diana Zvegintzov carried on through the rest of
1937 and the first half of 1938. (Zvegintzov’s reaction when Scrutton

22
received a scholarship: “Well well, I’d rather lose my reputation as a
prophet than my reputation as a coach.”)10
Scrutton might easily have passed Iris Murdoch on the pavement in front of
her tutor’s house in Chiswick. Murdoch lived nearby, and was getting
tutoring in classical languages herself. Like Scrutton, Murdoch’s first thought
had been to study English, but she was now having second thoughts and
cramming Greek and Latin. It’s possible they were seeing the same tutor.11
In late September 1938, the girls likely rode the Great Western Railway
west and north from Paddington to Oxford and, making their way laboriously
over the tracks and across the canal, lugged their things up Walton or St.
Giles Streets. Some wealthier girls would have been chauffeured to the
College gates. The entrance that received them all, an eclectic but dignified
composition in warm yellow stone, is described in the opening paragraph of
Old Somervillian Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night: “built by a modern
architect in a style neither new nor old, but stretching out reconciling hands
to past and present.”
Murdoch and Scrutton settled in at opposite ends of the College, Scrutton
in a room with small windows on the top story of the late-Victorian West
building (today, Park), Murdoch in an airy new room over the gates. The only
two Somervillians in their year who were reading Greats, they were
immediately brought together in tutorials with Mildred Hartley, Somerville’s
classics tutor. And so they finally met, Scrutton plopping down on the floor
of Murdoch’s room day after day as they began trying to turn themselves into
classicists. They too would be friends for life.

THE WOMEN ARE ON PROBATION

Scrutton and Murdoch had much in common: the kinds of schools they
attended, their choice of college, their interests, their course of study. The
years would reveal more: both became thinkers with large, imaginative
temperaments who traced connections others missed. Both would eventually
come to feel somewhat confined by and estranged from the academy.
But there was something emblematic, too, in the differences between their
rooms. Scrutton’s was dim and quiet, as far as possible from the gates on
Woodstock Road where the Somervillians came and went—a cell best suited
to study or sleep. Murdoch’s was above the entrance, sunny and colorful,
decorated with posters and a thin, square, art deco cushion in aquamarine.12

23
Similarly, as they settled into college life, Scrutton was cautious,
conscientious, a person who kept her emotions and her sometimes wry
thoughts mostly to herself. She was quiet, sober, and peripheral, like her
room. Murdoch by contrast was flamboyant, open, and known to everyone. In
Somerville’s dining hall, the seats closest to the high table were occupied by
the studious and scholarly, while those at the far end of the room were filled
by women whose lives centered more on society or sex. Scrutton and most of
her friends sat in the middle, between these extremes. Murdoch, though,
appeared everywhere. Dressed in dirndl skirts, unconcerned with what
others thought, she was magnetic to women and men alike. Her gift for
friendship with the widest array of people defined her from then on. Years
later, Philippa Foot asked her if she ever found anyone boring. “Never,” she
said.13
♦♦♦♦
Murdoch’s teachers adored her, though she was also the sort they worried
about. Shortly after their arrival, Dean Vera Farnell sat the first years down
and lectured them: “You must seriously realise that you have to be careful
how you behave. It isn’t a joking matter, the women are still very much on
probation in this University. You may think that it doesn’t matter if you do
something a little wild, but I can tell you that it will.”14 Farnell’s admonition
didn’t stop some Somervillians from slipping over the College walls at night
(curfew was 11:15, or midnight “in exceptional circumstances”),15 but hers
was a voice of hard experience. The prejudices and anxieties that had
prompted the University to cap the number of women undergraduates were
not dead. The sense of precariousness, that women’s position as members of
the University was unsettled, subsided after the war, but in 1938 it was still
deeply felt.
In the short term, the women couldn’t win. If they behaved themselves
impeccably and overcame all deficits to outclass their male peers, they
provoked airy contempt. Christopher Hobhouse’s chatty 1939 guidebook,
Oxford, gives a sense of the prevailing stereotypes:

24
 Though their numbers are small, a casual visitor to Oxford might well gain the impression that the
women form an actual majority. They are perpetually awheel. They bicycle in droves from lecture
to lecture, capped and gowned, handle-bars laden with note-books, and note-books crammed with
notes. Relatively few men go to lectures, the usefulness of which was superseded some while ago
by the invention of the printing press. The women, docile and literal, continue to flock to every
lecture with mediaeval zeal, and record in an hour of longhand scribbling what could easily have
been assimilated in ten minutes in an armchair.16

Hobhouse goes on to fantasize about the life of women “undergraduettes”:

“[a]fter dark, in their own college libraries or in their comfortless little
rooms, they huddle for hours on end, stooping and peering over standard text-
books.” He contrasts this imagined female servility with the “lordly” life of
male undergraduates, commanding college scouts to produce breakfasts and
lunches in their rooms, not merely skipping lectures but taking short-cuts
where they find the syllabus “wasteful or slow.” Hobhouse grudgingly
acknowledges the fruits of the women’s “stupefying assiduity,” even as he
tries to represent it as a fault: “The results of this obsession are clearly seen
in the examination class-lists.”
Heedless of the Farnells and the Hobhouses—as diligent as she was
ecstatic—Murdoch threw herself into every aspect of university life. She
dragged Scrutton with her into much of it: a “hurricane of essays and proses
and campaigns and committees and sherry parties and political and aesthetic
arguments.”17 Soon she would be involved too in theatricals and
publications. In particular, both Murdoch and Scrutton promptly got involved
in local politics. That fall, with Chamberlain’s strategy of appeasing Hitler at
the forefront of national conversation, they canvassed for A.D. Lindsay,
Master of Balliol College, who was running as an Independent Progressive
against Conservative Quintin Hogg. Then as now, student political opinion
leaned left (as Scrutton would later recall, the only question was, “how far
left do you want to go?”).18
Living with the sense of threat and decay that typified the interwar years,
they longed as much as any generation before or since to give themselves to a
redemptive cause. Not having been old enough to do anything about the
horrors of the Spanish Civil War, students threw themselves into the Lindsay
campaign as if it were a crusade. Scrutton, a principled but instinctively
moderate and pragmatic thinker, suspected that vocal Communist support was
doing the Lindsay campaign no good. She listened with disquiet one day as a
fellow student explained how she had been out campaigning for Lindsay—

25
and defending the Marxist theory of the state. The students were shocked
when the Oxford electorate narrowly elected Hogg. They represented the
defeat in Manichean terms: “the creative, the generous, the imaginative”
versus people dominated by “selfishness, stodginess, and insincerity.”19
Murdoch, more prone than Scrutton to radical devotion, became a
proselytizer for the Communist Party almost from the moment she arrived at
Oxford. This was a dominant part of her Oxford experience, not shared with
Scrutton. Writing to a friend from Badminton School in April 1939, she told
her, “Ann, you must see, that this is the only way . . . . We’ve got to
reorganize society from top to bottom—it’s rotten, it’s inefficient, it’s
fundamentally unjust, and it must be radically changed, even at the expense of
some bloodshed.” After some more remarks about the “carefully planned,
scientific” character of the coming revolution, she adds, “About Christianity
—I’m glad you are finding it good and a help to you. And I hope that it will
lead you to what I consider its only logical conclusion—communism. . . . My
religion, if I have one, at the moment is a passionate belief in the beautiful,
and a faith in the ultimate triumph of the people, the workers of the world.”20
She held on to this faith until close to the end of the war, when it was (for a
time) displaced by her friend’s faith, Christianity.
Murdoch’s capacity for friendship and for passionate devotion fused in a
remarkable number of love affairs already during her first year at Oxford. In
the same letter, she remarks that she is “in love with about six men all at
once.” After graduation, sharing a flat in London with Philippa Bosanquet,
they agreed one night to tell one another about the proposals of marriage
they’d each received. Bosanquet went first, then Murdoch. As Murdoch’s list
went on and on, Bosanquet asked, annoyed, whether perhaps it would save
time to list the men who had not proposed to her. The length of the list is
partly a reflection of circumstance; she was surrounded her first year by men
about to be called away, perhaps to their deaths. But it is partly too an index
of Murdoch’s capacity to display and inspire devotion.
♦♦♦♦
Somehow, Murdoch was able to give herself no less fully to her studies—
though her and Scrutton’s Mods tutorials with Mildred Hartley arguably
confirmed one of Hobhouse’s criticisms: that women dons (faculty) applied
extreme pressure to their pupils to equal or outdo their male counterparts.
The reputation of the women’s colleges, he writes, is “a scourge” used by

26
“the female don” to “drive her pupils to ever more exaggerated efforts.”21
Determined that her students would match their male peers stride for stride,
no matter their starting point, Hartley insisted that Murdoch and Scrutton do
Greek and Latin translations and even compositions in prose and verse—a
typical feature of boys’ school curricula. These verse compositions taught the
young women nothing. Scrutton later likened them to “a rather desperate kind
of crossword puzzle.”22
Happily, there were other aspects of scholarly life that were more
rewarding. Murdoch sketched ancient Greek vases in the basement of the
Ashmolean Museum, and both she and Scrutton attended lectures from E.R.
Dodds on Greek tragedy and on Plato. Scrutton had discovered Plato as a 16-
year-old at Downe House and loved the fusion of reason and imagination in
his dialogues. Murdoch reacted against his politics. At Hartley’s instigation,
both Murdoch and Scrutton participated for a time in German-Jewish émigré
Eduard Fraenkel’s legendary, years-long seminar on Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon.
Fraenkel’s presence highlights something noteworthy about the Oxford
atmosphere at the turn of the 1940s; Oxford was full of displaced persons.
Murdoch wrote to a friend in 1941 describing Oxford as “a gentle civilised
city full of elderly German Jews with faun-eyes & Central European scholars
with long hair & longer sentences.”23 Led by Helen Darbishire, Somerville
took in a cluster of refugee scholars, the College’s modest finances
notwithstanding. And they were not unique in this.
Fraenkel’s personal influence in Oxford was complex. He acted with
shocking impropriety toward women students, inviting them to his rooms in
Corpus Christi College and groping them while discussing Greek literature.
This was widely known and did not pass unremarked. Isobel Henderson,
Scrutton and Murdoch’s Roman history tutor, warned Murdoch that Fraenkel
would “paw [her] a bit, but never mind.”24 The “never mind” at the end is
telling. The general opinion on Fraenkel by the women of Oxford seems to
have been that he had an aggravating habit, like a tendency to interrupt, not
that he was a predator.*
Murdoch adored Fraenkel despite the pawing, and remained in
correspondence with him for years. Scrutton, who was less prone than her
friend to radical discipleship, seemed not to attract Fraenkel and got off
without pawing, but also without much of a connection. Both, though,

27
glimpsed for the first time in Fraenkel’s seminar what a scholarly life could
mean.
The seminar was a new pedagogical specimen at Oxford, transplanted
from the soil of the German university. For two hours a week, in a ground-
floor room at Corpus Christi, Fraenkel inducted participants, colleagues and
students alike, into a kind of thoroughness and exactitude they had never
known. Each week, an undergraduate and a member of the faculty would be
assigned to comment on the next small bit of text. The undergraduate would
open discussion and then, once he or she was reduced to confusion, the don
would take over. When the don, too, inevitably faltered under Fraenkel’s
inquisition (the seminar was once likened to a gathering of rabbits, addressed
by a stoat), Fraenkel would take charge. From there, “the discussion . . .
might go on for weeks, citing other relevant passages and ranging over most
of European history.”25 A generation of eminent classicists—Hugh Lloyd-
Jones, Kenneth Dover—pointed back to the seminar as modeling for them
what their own work should be like. Mary Warnock, though her career would
be in philosophy and then politics, saw an inheritance in her own work: the
“deep desire to get things right, even quite small things . . . .”26
Agamemnon—indeed, the entire Oresteia—is a profound meditation on
evil, suffering, and retribution, from the first great chorus with its hymn to
Zeus. Scrutton remembered the seminar returning, again and again, to these
words:
Zeus has led us on to know,
The Helmsman lays it down as law
that we must suffer, suffer into truth.27

Perhaps no one could read a work of this kind with a great scholar and not be
affected. But Scrutton recalled a moment in which she and Murdoch brought
something to the tragedy that their Eton and Rugby-educated peers did not—
maybe precisely because they’d been less cloistered. They were talking with
a fellow student about a passage one of them had been assigned. Scrutton
was struck by “how much better equipped than us he seemed to be about the
language, and how much less idea he had of the point of what was being
said.”28 In the time that an elite public-school curriculum might have given to
Greek, she and Murdoch had delved instead into history and literature and
politics. And that mattered, too. Murdoch wrote perhaps her best poem about

28
the experience of the seminar. They sat in the ancient-looking room at sunset,
week after week, everyone half-knowing what might lie ahead—that, like
Iphigenia and Cassandra, like Achilles and Agamemnon, their lives might be
cut short: “Did we expect the war? What did we fear?/First love’s
incinerating crippling flame,/Or that it would appear/In public that we could
not name/The Aorist of some familiar verb.”29

AN OPENING

In the 1938–39 academic year, with another war looming, it was a live
question, inside and outside the University, whether Oxford should simply
shut down. Limited conscription of 20- to 22-year-old men began in April
1939, following the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. In September,
conscription was extended to all able-bodied men between 18 and 41 who
were not conscientious objectors—and many objectors were assigned to
national service work. The exodus raised practical questions. Who would
lecture? If there were lectures, who would attend? Would there be enough to
justify maintaining the organizational life of the University?
It helped that there was precedent. Oxford had weathered the Great War
with a skeleton crew of the very young, the old, the infirm, pacifists, clergy—
and women, already part of the life of the place, though they were not yet
eligible for degrees. In 1914, people did not anticipate how long and bloody
the conflict would be, so it was natural to carry on in the hope that all would
soon return to normal. As a result, those who held the decision in 1939 knew
that the University could carry on under such circumstances.
They knew, too, that they could count on the strength of the women’s
colleges, each of which had a long waiting list. The quotas of course went
out the window. In June 1939, a few months before the invasion of Poland,
Oxford awarded BAs to 1025 men and 226 women. In June 1940, just after
the evacuation of Dunkirk and the fall of Paris, the numbers were 377 and
215. Many of the men who stayed were completing degrees judged to be of
strategic importance—in the sciences, for instance. In June of 1941, there
were as many women graduating as men; by 1942, women were the majority.
This does not mean that women were the majority of the student body as a
whole. Beginning in 1939, a number of teenaged men came up to Oxford for
shortened courses, or to begin courses they hoped to finish after the war.
Meanwhile, until several years into the war, women were encouraged to

29
complete their degrees so that they could fill white-collar positions being
vacated by men. For a brief window, then, from 1939 to 1942, many of the
classrooms and lecture halls of Oxford were populated mostly by women,
accompanied by a thin and unrepresentative sprinkling of men:
“conscientious objectors, the disabled, and a few ordinands.”30 The women
began to fill another kind of vacated position, too: as the protégés of their
remaining teachers. This was the world in which Murdoch and Scrutton
transitioned from the first to the second part of their Greats course, and in
which Bosanquet began her three-year course in Modern Greats—that is,
Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).
What were the effects of this sudden transformation of Oxford from “a
man’s University with a certain number of women in it” to one in which men
and women were on an equal footing or in which (among advanced students)
women even predominated?31 Scrutton later wrote,
The effect was to make it a great deal easier for a woman to be heard in discussion than it is in
normal times. Sheer loudness of voice has a lot to do with the difficulty, but there is also a
temperamental difference about confidence—about the amount of work that one thinks is needed
to make one’s opinion worth hearing.32

A summary of facts is suggestive. Whereas prior to the war, men had been a
dominant majority in all courses except English literature and modern
languages, suddenly they were a clear and consistent majority only in the
natural sciences (where policy welcomed men to continue toward their
degrees), jurisprudence, and theology. The change was most dramatic in
Literae humaniores and PPE—traditionally among the most male-dominated
courses. Suddenly, there was an unprecedented preponderance of young
women in these courses. Suddenly—at the exact moment when Bosanquet
came up, and when Murdoch and Scrutton’s syllabus turned to philosophy—
most of Oxford’s philosophy students were women. From autumn 1940
through 1942, women were frequently a majority at meetings of the Jowett
Society, the undergraduate philosophical society. The presidency was held
by Somervillian Jean Coutts, a Greats student a year ahead of Murdoch and
Scrutton. Then by Elizabeth Anscombe of St. Hugh’s College. Then by
Philippa Bosanquet.
♦♦♦♦

30
Missing and fretting about many of their friends, wondering what on earth
they were still doing in university with a war on, Murdoch and Scrutton
revised for their Mods exams through the historically bitter winter of 1940.
Equipped with hot-water bottles that went cold long before the end of their
three-hour exams in the grand, fan-vaulted—but unheated—Divinity School,
they each managed to grind out second-class marks. Certainly, they’d
dreamed of getting firsts. But given where they’d begun, they were
unashamed. Now the curriculum would shift back to their native tongue. And
they would discover what they wanted to do with their lives.

DONALD MACKENZIE MACKINNON

The philosophical climate of the late 1930s was turbulent, but not in a way
likely to inspire anyone who wasn’t already a philosopher. During the first
three decades of the twentieth century, Cambridge had been the vital center of
Anglophone philosophy, home to Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell,
and Ludwig Wittgenstein as they produced groundbreaking works in logic
and the philosophy of mathematics. No one of comparable significance was
at Oxford, and Oxford was not associated with any philosophical movement
—unless it was the tail end of nineteenth-century Hegelianism.
This began to change in the 1930s, as a rising generation of Oxford
philosophers began to engage with their Cambridge peers and with others
beyond. Most influential of all, inside and outside the academy, was a brash,
attention-seeking young lecturer, Alfred Jules Ayer. In 1936, Ayer published
an improbable book: a philosophical best-seller, Language, Truth and
Logic. Ayer was a Greats student at the turn of the decade, and on the
recommendation of his Christ Church tutor Gilbert Ryle began to explore a
new philosophical school based in Vienna. The Vienna Circle, which Ayer
joined for a time, was devoted to the picture traced in the last chapter. The
Circle aspired to banish from science—and philosophy—any talk that went
beyond empirical observation, beyond the “facts.” Taking their stand against
the spirit of “metaphysics,” they embraced “the opposite spirit of
enlightenment and anti-metaphysical factual research.”33 They attempted
this in part through a purification of language, seeking to eliminate from our
descriptions of the world all traces of human subjectivity. They advocated
and tried to produce “a neutral system of formulae, for a symbolism freed

31
from the slag of historical languages; and also . . . a total system of
concepts.”
Ayer returned from Vienna inflamed with what he had seen and heard. He
began to connect it with his earlier reading of the British empiricist tradition:
Hobbes and Locke and (especially) Hume. Prodded by another rising Oxford
philosopher, his friend Isaiah Berlin, Ayer put his thoughts into book form,
and the book became a sensation, drawing both praise and denunciation in
the academic and popular press alike. It was, among other things, an attack
on all philosophy that had ever been written in Oxford.
The opening sentence lays down the challenge: “The traditional disputes
of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are
unfruitful.”34 The reason, Ayer says, is that philosophers have not policed
their language to make sure that their statements are even meaningful. And
what kinds of statements are meaningful? Just two: (1) statements about the
world that could be confirmed or disconfirmed by observation, and (2)
statements about the logic of our language. There are statements of fact, open
to verification or falsification by experience. There are statements defining
words for use in statements of fact. All else is sophistry and illusion.
Ayer acknowledges nothing as a statement of fact—even if it seems to be
one—if the speaker does not know “what observations would lead him . . . to
accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.”35 Ayer’s
chapter on ethics and theology is instructive on this point. Consider someone
who says that there is a God. Is she reporting an observation? (If so, of what?
A sunrise? A feeling? The whole world?) Or are there observations she can
imagine making that would lead her to retract her statement? If she does not
understand her faith as an observation-report, and if she cannot say what
observations would lead her to renounce her faith, Ayer says that her
statement is meaningless. She is saying nothing—despite how it seems to her
or to others. Or consider someone who says that some action is wrong.
Again, Ayer asks, is he reporting an observation? Or are there observations
he can imagine making that would lead him to retract his statement? Neither,
Ayer supposes. Moral judgments, he thinks, simply praise or blame; they
neither report nor predict anything. Ayer concludes, “If now I . . . say,
‘Stealing money is wrong,’ I produce a sentence which has no factual
meaning—that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false.
It is as if I had written ‘Stealing money!!’—where the shape and thickness of

32
the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of
moral disapproval is . . . being expressed.”36
There are serious problems with Ayer’s view, some of which we will take
up later. For the moment, it is the legacy of Ayer’s view that matters. Ayer’s
tone of breezy dismissal was all too easy for undergraduates to adopt. More
importantly, Ayer’s view, with its restrictive conception of a fact, helped
harden the dichotomy that had been emerging since the early-modern period,
between “fact” and “value.” Again, according to this dichotomy—this picture
—values are human projections onto a purposeless or “value-free” reality.
Ayer embraced this picture, drew out its implications, and gave it
swaggering expression. It didn’t matter how many details of his views were
later rejected. Ayer more than anyone established the terms in which young
philosophers in the late 1930s and early 1940s approached their discipline.
He rendered suspect virtually all pre-modern moral philosophy, which did
not sunder fact and value. Again, Ayer: “the traditional disputes of
philosophers are . . . as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.”
Language, Truth and Logic was reprinted in 1947, selling even more
copies the second time around. For an extended period before and after the
war, then, philosophers developed their theories in response to Ayer. In a
letter to Bosanquet, immediately after their graduation, Murdoch wrote that
she was looking ahead and contemplating the significance of life, but added
glibly that of course such expressions were strictly meaningless. Ayer was in
the air.
As Murdoch’s letter illustrates, the effect of Ayer’s work was essentially
destructive. It did not help people think about their most urgent questions,
such as what to do with their lives. It undercut such thinking. As Murdoch
would later recognize, Ayer’s work did imply judgments about better and
worse ways to live. It glamorized what I called the Dawkins Sublime: a self-
congratulatory toughness in facing a world where the words “God” and
“good” have no meaning. But it was incompatible with the political idealism
of Murdoch and her peers—with the judgments they were making every day
about right and wrong, just and unjust.
Ayer’s philosophy offered little to the rising generation. Though Scrutton,
Murdoch, and Bosanquet each had a philosophical temperament—all three
won scholarships with distinguished general papers—idealistic young
people like them were unlikely to find Ayer’s philosophy helpful. They found

33
it unsettling, even dumbfounding. But not constructive. If philosophy meant
“what Ayer did,” what could it say about Franco and Hitler?
♦♦♦♦
Philosophy was salvaged for the Somervillians when—Somerville having no
philosophy tutor on staff—they were assigned for tutorials to young
theologian-philosopher Donald MacKinnon. More famous now in theological
circles, MacKinnon was a philosopher before he was a theologian, and was
one of the most impressive minds of his generation. A Winchester pupil, he
did so well in Greats at New College that he was quickly brought back—still
only in his twenties—to be a Fellow at Keble. The hulking Scotsman was
promptly invited to join “the Brethren,” a small coterie of rising
philosophers convened by Isaiah Berlin and J.L. Austin.37 The group
included Ayer. Less than a decade later, at the remarkable age of 34,
MacKinnon was snatched away for a professorship at Aberdeen.
MacKinnon was deeply interested in the eighteenth-century thinkers
Joseph Butler and Immanuel Kant—indeed in the whole history of
philosophy. He taught his students to engage seriously with figures whom
Ayer had consigned to irrelevance. But as evidenced by the impression he
made on Austin, Berlin, and the rest of the Brethren, MacKinnon also kept up
with contemporary philosophy. He took seriously Ayer’s charge that his own
inquiries—in ethics and theology—were meaningless. MacKinnon identified
especially with Kant. As MacKinnon interpreted him, Kant showed skeptics
like Ayer how to leave room for transcendent realities, even in the face of
their skepticism.38 In his portrayal of Kant—as a thinker determined to
reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable—MacKinnon could have been writing
about himself.
MacKinnon wanted to reinvigorate theological reflection in the face of
Ayer’s challenge because he found such reflection necessary to address the
ethical and political issues of the moment. Like Kant, he was fixated on
human evil, and on our responsibilities in the face of it. Like Dostoevsky’s
Ivan Karamazov—indeed, like Dostoevsky himself—MacKinnon drew
examples from newspapers of the terrible things people did to one another.
He believed that any adequate philosophy or theology must be capable of
speaking to these examples.
When MacKinnon is not remembered for these things—his brilliance, his
preoccupation with the special challenges to theology of his mid-twentieth–

34
century moment—he is remembered as a tormented eccentric. His
eccentricity was real. Dennis Nineham recounted how MacKinnon gave him
a make-up tutorial in a pub one Sunday morning, pacing up and down for
minutes on end, practically shouting: “You see WHEN Kant says this, he
MEANS to say that, and THIS is CRUCIAL.” The other patrons fell silent
witnessing this performance, then broke into applause. MacKinnon blushed.
He had lost track of his surroundings and had no notion of the scene he was
creating.39 The stories that still circulate about him—sucking on razor
blades, chewing up pencils or lumps of coal, rolling himself up in a rug—
date predominantly from his Keble years and probably reflect the stresses he
was under during the war. Scrutton wrote:
MacKinnon often made strange unpredictable movements and, in particular, strange grimaces,
which . . . seemed to express profound anguish. A lot of the stories about him are true enough. He
did wave pokers and other things about in an alarming way . . . . He did lie on the floor or beat the
wall violently . . . . He was prone to long silences, sometimes not seeming to hear at all what was
said to him.40

If MacKinnon suffered from a condition like Tourette’s, it may have been

exacerbated in those days, when—disqualified from military service by his
asthma—he threw himself into teaching as if to justify his existence, taking as
many pupils as would ordinarily be divided among three or more fellows.
Like Uriah in the book of Samuel, he refused to sleep at home with his wife
while other men were stationed across the channel and overseas. He slept in
his rooms at Keble when he wasn’t on duty as a fire lookout, a post in which
he took great pride. He sometimes gave tutorials dressed in his coveralls
from the night before. Years later, recalling his tutorials, Scrutton found
MacKinnon’s generosity unfathomable. One day, having spoken with her for
two hours (the standard was one), MacKinnon said, “I don’t think we’ve
really got to the bottom of this. Come back on Thursday.”41 As Bosanquet
would later remark, he had no sense of proportion.
He understandably took some getting used to. But he also inspired
devotion: by his intelligence and insight, by the attention he lavished on
students and his tendency to worry over them (he wrote to Bosanquet daily as
she waited for news about Michael Foot’s release), by the depth of his
engagement with both the material he taught and the crises of the time. Many
students, from one end of his career to the other, credit him with setting the
direction of their lives. He was the obvious person for Bosanquet to seek out

35
in her grief after seeing the footage from Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. By
the end of their undergraduate years, Bosanquet, Murdoch, and Scrutton were
all considering philosophy as a path. Bosanquet later described MacKinnon
as “holy” (this from a committed atheist) and as having “created” her.42
MacKinnon appeared recurringly in her journals until the end of her life. In
1945, Murdoch wrote about MacKinnon, “After meeting him one really
understands . . . how those people at Galilee got up & followed without any
hesitation.”43
There was danger in this. I have remarked on Murdoch’s penchant for
devotion—for discipleship. Peter Conradi traces this to her childhood, to her
deep, only-child’s attachment to her “quiet bookish” father.44 Ever after, she
sought out father figures. Whatever the cause, Scrutton and Murdoch diverged
in their relationship to MacKinnon just as they had in their relationship to
Fraenkel. There was no harassment here, and no affair. But Murdoch’s
connection with MacKinnon became far more intense than Scrutton’s. She
wrote to Frank Thompson about him, “It’s good to meet someone so
extravagantly unselfish, so fantastically noble . . . . He inspires a pure
devotion.”45 Was the dramatic, unguarded Murdoch more attractive to her
teachers? Did she seek such connections? Scrutton certainly admired
MacKinnon—her later philosophical work shows his influence as deeply as
any of her friends’ does—but it was Murdoch and Bosanquet who formed
adult friendships with MacKinnon. The friendship with the intense,
demonstrative Murdoch would become a problem. And MacKinnon never
did the obvious, necessary thing, introducing his students to his wife.
MacKinnon did not offer his students a philosophical program like Ayer’s.
Insofar as MacKinnon had a program, it was to attend to perennial human
questions and to the philosophers who addressed them. He did not ignore
Ayer’s critique. But neither did he cease to ask questions that he found
meaningful, even if Ayer would have called them “pseudo-questions.” He
went on teaching philosophy as something integrally connected to life, when
this conception had nearly been abandoned by his peers. A month before the
letter quoted above, Murdoch wrote to Thompson, “I had almost given up
thinking of people & actions in terms of value—meeting [MacKinnon] has
made it a significant way of thinking again.”46
Murdoch’s, Scrutton’s, and Bosanquet’s studies inevitably came to feel
unreal, as the war and their university years ground on; it is a recurring theme

36
in Murdoch’s letters to both Thompson and David Hicks. Murdoch especially
longed for more direct engagement with the world. But philosophy at least
was not pointless. And thanks to MacKinnon’s tireless instruction, all three
came away with first-class marks in their final exams—even Bosanquet,
encased in plaster.

MISS ANSCOMBE

Sometime in 1940, as they were all beginning to study philosophy, all three
Somervillians became casually acquainted with a peer as undeterred by
intellectual fashion and as committed to the philosophical enterprise as
MacKinnon was: Elizabeth Anscombe.47 Anscombe was at St. Hugh’s, not
Somerville, and was a year ahead of Murdoch and Scrutton. But she was
friends with Somervillian Jean Coutts, and so came to Somerville a lot.
Intimidatingly brilliant, sometimes curtly dismissive, but also capable of
immersing herself with complete self-forgetfulness in a philosophical
problem, Anscombe would become as much icon as friend to each of the
others. She also baffled them.
During her own final exams in 1941, Anscombe appeared one night in the
doorway of Scrutton’s room. Anscombe was due to sit for her political
theory exam the following morning. She wanted Scrutton’s take on a thought
that had occurred to her as she looked for the first time at books she was
supposed to have read long before. Scrutton recalled how Anscombe “said
thoughtfully in her beautiful quiet voice, ‘some of the stuff is actually quite
interesting. But there’s one thing here that I don’t understand. As far as I can
see, this man,’ and she drew out Hobbes’ Leviathan, ‘is just saying that you
mustn’t revolt unless you can. Can that be what he means?’ ”48 Scrutton
swallowed her astonishment and told her friend that this was indeed a
standard scholarly take. Anscombe too got a first.
How did Anscombe turn into that person, the person she was at 22?
Well, how did any of them?

* Another bit of Oxford folklore, reported to me by Old Somervillian Miranda Villiers (conversation
with author, July 20, 2012): how would students at each of the four women’s colleges respond, on
being told there was a man she ought to meet? LMH: “Who are his people?” Somerville: “What
does he read?” St. Hugh’s: “What games does he play?” St. Hilda’s: “Where is he?”

37
* Was this just the different outlook of a different era? Can we comprehend Henderson’s attitude,
though we would not accept it? Henderson did not live in College and had a reputation as more
worldly than her colleagues. Perhaps she didn’t think sexual expression mattered much (within
wide limits), and thus if it enabled a woman to get ahead in the world, “never mind.” Perhaps she
was willing to give Fraenkel a pass because he kept his demonstrations within limits. Perhaps,
too, she pitied him—fired from his position in 1933, slurred by his former colleagues as an “uppity
Jewboy,” forced to flee for his life. Fraenkel also suffered from a painfully deformed right arm,
the result of a childhood bone infection, and may have seemed more sad than threatening on that
account. Certainly detectable in Henderson’s remarks is her respect for Fraenkel’s position and
work (the sort of respect that has shielded many men from accusations of harassment or
assault). Not everyone was so tolerant. In her Memoir (Duckbacks, 2002), Mary Warnock
relates conversations with an array of Fraenkel’s women students. Several were indignant or
horrified.

38
 Chapter 3

Daughters of 1919

“WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?”

When Oxford’s 1938 spring recess ended and Elizabeth Anscombe settled in
for Trinity term, she didn’t know what to expect when—or if?—she returned
home.
Elizabeth and her parents had quarreled all through her secondary-school
years, during her steady march toward Catholicism. To be fair, they
quarreled about lots of things, not just religion. Allen Anscombe was often
overwhelmed by his daughter. Why couldn’t she be like the twins? John was
now a schoolteacher, like his father. Tom was a curate in the Church of
England. Allen had no use for religion, not since the War, but Tom’s
becoming a minister wasn’t an offense. Tom was a touch enthusiastic, but at
least it was the state church, not Rome—not popery. But Elizabeth, oh his
dear Bessie. What had become of the little girl who stood beside him and
recited Latin verbs in her clear voice while he worked on carpentry?1
Elizabeth had been about 12, just starting secondary school, when she
picked up a book about the English Catholic martyrs: Richard Challoner’s
Memoirs of Missionary Priests and other Catholics of both Sexes who
suffered Death or Imprisonment in England on account of their Religion,
from the year 1577 till the end of the reign of Charles II. Challoner sent her
looking for more. At 15, she spent a summer with an aunt and uncle in
Normandy, reading book after book by G.K. Chesterton. She told an
interviewer later, “In the course of reading one of these, The Everlasting
Man, it came to [me] that I believed in God and ought to pray.” She sought
out a priest.2 Her fights with her parents intensified on her return; these didn’t
go well for her parents. Young Elizabeth was increasingly, obnoxiously
skilled at verbal combat. She excelled in debate at Sydenham High School.

39
Allen did physics and woodworking, not politics or religion. He used to
make a gesture like cranking an engine when Elizabeth started in on him or
his wife.
Elizabeth had her independent spirit partly by inheritance. Gertrude
Thomas Anscombe was a decade older than her husband, had had part of a
university education from the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and had
spent years, before she married, teaching classics. She did not follow the
scripts society handed to her. Literally, even. At her and Allen’s wedding in
1914, she refused to recite the traditional Anglican vows, promising to love
and cherish him, but not to obey.
Allen and Gertrude first tried to argue Elizabeth out of her nascent
Catholicism. It didn’t help that their real objections stemmed from prejudice:
Catholicism was unrespectable, even repulsive. Such anti-Catholicism
remained strong in Great Britain through mid-century. As one turn-of-the-
century observer wrote, the “opinion of the religious people I knew and
loved was that Roman Catholic worship is idolatry, and that it was better to
be an Atheist than a Papist.”3 Elizabeth’s parents had internalized the
prevailing repugnance. At one point, family lore has it, Gertrude and Allen’s
will excluded any Catholic child from inheriting. Unsurprisingly, they knew
little about the faith their daughter was embracing or about its history, even in
England. Once, Allen picked up a volume of Challoner and started thumbing
through it. He became perplexed. He had assumed that Catholics had all left
England or converted when Henry had his Reformation. If he knew any
martyr stories, they were from the more famous, anti-Catholic Foxe’s Book of
Martyrs. Wasn’t it Catholics who had imprisoned people and burned them
for their faith? Weren’t they all foreigners? “But these are all English
names,” he said. “What did you expect?” retorted Elizabeth.
Getting nowhere, her parents asked an Anglican priest to talk to her. This
was unkind to the poor man. He had scarcely sat down and offered a few
pleasantries when Elizabeth began grilling him on his understanding of the
Eucharist. He scrabbled for common ground, expressing his conviction that
the consecrated host is in some sense the body of Christ. Elizabeth was
unimpressed. She wanted to know if the priest was committed to the same
miracle that she was. “Is it bread?” she demanded.4
Finally, Gertrude and Allen issued an ultimatum. Elizabeth had won a
scholarship to St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. Like Murdoch and Scrutton, she
planned to read classics. (And with a mother who taught her children Greek

40
at home, she didn’t need an extra year to prepare.) But though the Clara
Evelyn Mordan award was St. Hugh’s top scholarship, it was not all-
inclusive. Gertrude and Allen told Elizabeth that if she joined the Church,
they would cut off her support.
Didn’t they understand who they’d raised?
Elizabeth went up in the fall of 1937 and promptly presented herself for
catechesis at Blackfriars Priory, the Dominican study house in Oxford. Fr.
Richard Kehoe found himself with , surely, one of the most advanced
catechumens he had ever known. Elizabeth had considered herself a Catholic
since 1935, and had read everything she could get her hands on.5 Her
questions were not elementary ones about Mary or the Pope. She wanted to
know whether she was required to accept a philosophical claim she had
encountered in Bernard Boedder’s Natural Theology, to the effect that God
knows what people would have done under circumstances contrary to fact.
Kehoe told her, no, she didn’t need to believe that.
On April 28, 1938, during the first week of Trinity term, Elizabeth was
received into the Church under the grand, rounded vault of the Oxford
Oratory, next door to Somerville.
♦♦♦♦
So, what then? She had gone and done it, the thing her parents had forbidden.
Now she had to go home and face the consequences—her own small
martyrdom, perhaps. She didn’t want to be estranged from her parents—or
her brothers. The siblings fought too, naturally,* but love goes deeper than
rivalry, and there was talk of another war. Elizabeth rode back to London at
the end of term and found herself again at her parents’ home on Trewsbury
Road.
She soon knew it was going to be all right. It was now full summer, and
she needed a skirt altered. Gertrude had Elizabeth stand on a table and went
to work. Neither said much. But as her mother tucked and pinned the new
hem, Elizabeth knew there was no break between them. Gertrude had had to
drop out of university when her own father died. She could no longer afford
it. Elizabeth baffled and infuriated her mother. But there was no way
Gertrude Thomas Anscombe—classics scholar, feminist—was going to stop
her daughter from finishing her degree.

A BIG DARK HILL

41
Anscombe was Gertrude and Allen’s daughter. She was the daughter of a
Church she first discovered in books. She was also the daughter of those
books: Challoner, whose stories of persecuted recusants inspired her
devotion; Chesterton and Shaw, whose polemics shaped her style; Boedder
and Aquinas, who introduced her to philosophy and taught her that it could be
an offering to God.
Scrutton, Murdoch, Bosanquet: whose daughters were they?
♦♦♦♦
They were all, before they were anything else, daughters of the Armistice.
Anscombe, Murdoch, and Scrutton were all born within six months, between
mid-March and mid-September 1919. Bosanquet was born just over a year
later. They were at the leading edge of the post–Great War baby boom, as the
war’s survivors were demobilized, returned home, and started families.
In every case but Murdoch’s, their parents were married before the end of
the war, and all but Murdoch had an older sibling or two. Anscombe, the
oldest, was born where her father was still stationed, in Limerick, Ireland.
But if they weren’t daughters of homecoming marriages, they were
nevertheless daughters of the so-called “lost generation.”* Their fathers were
all officers in the British Army. All saw combat and came home altered.
Allen Anscombe was wounded in February 1917, precipitating his transfer to
Ireland. Thomas Scrutton, a chaplain, was also wounded, in 1918. Unlike
Allen Anscombe, he kept his faith. But Scrutton’s attempts to explain to the
young men of his regiment the importance of all the killing and dying
converted him to pacifism.6
♦♦♦♦
Though Mary Scrutton was not a Catholic—nor a Christian of any sort—it is
impossible to talk about her origins without talking about faith. Her parents’
world centered on it. Thomas Scrutton had not grown up a Christian. His
father, a famous judge, had been hostile to religion, directing that when he
died, he should not be given a church funeral. (His dictate was not followed,
because it wasn’t discovered until too late.) But Thomas converted to
Christianity in early adulthood after a series of dramatic spiritual
experiences and became an Anglican priest. His daughter Mary would partly
—but not entirely—reverse this movement. She drifted away from her

42
parents’ faith during adolescence. She expected something more to happen
when she prayed, and when it didn’t—when she didn’t have the kind of
experiences that had been central to her father’s conversion—she felt let
down. In interviews late in life, she likened Christianity to an engine she
couldn’t start. But she retained great respect for her parents’ “imaginative,
humane and liberal” creed and lives.7 She would acquire a reputation for
impatience with dismissive critics and caricatures of religion. She had seen
how thoughtful and constructive it could be.
Thomas and Lesley Hay Scrutton met before the war but became close in
1914, just after the start of hostilities, when economic panic put lots of
people out of work in Thomas’s southeast London parish. Lesley responded
to a call for volunteers, and she and Thomas began working side by side,
doing whatever needed to be done, as they would for the rest of their shared
life. They were engaged within a year and married in 1916. Much of their
work in Greenford, where they moved in 1924, was of a similar sort: helping
new neighbors in that burgeoning suburb connect with one another and get
vital services that had not yet been established nearby. Some people would
have been resentful at the transformation of their sleepy rural parish. But
Lesley organized gatherings for women who had no friends and no venues in
which to make them. Thomas won a seat on the local council and pushed
developers to do right by the waves of newcomers. At the same time, thanks
to the Scruttons’ involvement with Quaker Relief, the Anglican Pacifist
Fellowship, and other such organizations, their home was a way station for
missionaries, relief workers, and refugees. There was always talk about
politics and current events around the Scrutton dinner table, and it was
engaged talk. Mary was surprised later to meet people who didn’t think of
politics as a part of life, people who “regard[ed] the occasional intrusion of
political events into real life as an unfortunate mistake.”8
Even Thomas’s preaching carried him out of the sanctuaries of his
churches. The church he served during Mary’s late adolescence opened onto
the marketplace in Kingston-on-Thames. Thomas would stand on a chair
outdoors after evening services and invite questions. England was rapidly
secularizing in these years, and he always drew a crowd of curious non-
churchgoers, asking questions like whether everything in the Bible is true.
(His answer: “no.”)
Mary’s parents both came from well-to-do professional families: Lesley
Hay’s father David helped engineer the first underground rail lines in

43
London. And Thomas and Lesley’s life was comfortable, too. They could
afford a domestic servant. Of the modest privileges the family enjoyed, the
most significant for Mary—apart from private schooling—was the scope and
character of her childhood home. From ages 5–15, she had the run of the
Greenfield rectory grounds. The rectory had been a hobby farm,
encompassing fields and ponds and a number of outbuildings, now mostly in
disrepair. Following, watching, sometimes trapping and tending frogs, toads,
newts, and mice, Mary became ardently zoophilic. It would be a decade into
her career before she began to connect this love with philosophy, but the
foundation was laid during her primary-school years. From as far back as she
could recall, Mary hated dolls and wanted only stuffed animals for toys.
Notwithstanding her admiration for her parents, Mary reflected later on a
lack of closeness between her and them (particularly between her and her
father). She attributed this to a generational divide. As engaging as she found
their tea-time conversations about the rising menace of fascism, and the
extent to which it was rooted in the punitive measures of the Treaty of
Versailles, the Great War stood between them:
All through my childhood, that war loomed steadily in the background like a big dark hill
overshadowing the landscape. Our ideas of what it meant were not very clear. But because this hill
was a place where only adults went, we gradually came to feel that it was not as real as the places
that we ourselves could visit. Our elders’ concentration on it began to make them seem alien,
removing them from the rapidly changing world that we thought we understood.9

Then too, Lesley and Thomas belonged to a generation who had radically
lost faith in their elders—and carried this loss of faith into their parenting.
The elders had recruited their generation to a glorious cause. And those who
fought the war had believed what they were told. Instead, their experience
was Thomas’s: crouched beside the broken and dying, trying and failing to
explain how all the blood and filth, degradation and loss were worthwhile.
When they returned home and began raising their own children, they were
much more hesitant than their own parents had been to use the tones of
authority. Or so it seemed to Mary later, looking back.
Though her parents were reluctant to impose on her, this couldn’t keep
Mary from developing her own crisis of confidence. She was constantly
pestered by parents and teachers alike on account of her daydreamy
sloppiness. Though she was bright, she always felt she was failing to live up
to people’s expectations: her grandparents’, her maiden aunts’, her teachers’,

44
her father’s. Ponds and fields and books were places of escape. When Mary
left for Downe House School in 1932, the thing she liked best about it was
the way its founder and headmistress, Olive Willis, minimized rules,
encouraging students to sleep outdoors in summer or to hike to the horizon to
see what was there. There was plenty of time, too, to learn languages or
mathematics—or history from Jean Rowntree, the teacher who coached her
students on how to write the general paper for Oxford. But there were also
whole afternoons to embark on impromptu picnics, to sit and listen to visitors
like novelist Charles Williams, or to stand between the stacks in the library
discovering for the first time the fusion of thought and imagination in the
dialogues of Plato.

“A PERFECT TRINITY OF LOVE”

Scrutton, Murdoch, and Anscombe all grew up in suburban London:

Anscombe in Sydenham to the southeast, Scrutton and Murdoch to the west.
They were all more or less middle class, though the Scruttons were
considerably better off. Murdoch’s father was a minor civil servant. Like all
the fathers in this story, he was not especially young—29—when his
philosopher-daughter was born. From a once-successful line of Irish farmers
but born just as the farm was about to fail, Hughes Murdoch lost his father
when he was 13. His mother and her three children retained their
respectability, and they weren’t penniless—but they weren’t far from it,
either. The family were of mixed English and Irish ancestry and evangelical
Protestant, so neither young Hughes nor his mother objected to his sailing off
to London at 16 to apprentice himself as a clerk at Scotland Yard. This laid
the groundwork for his later career.10
His wife-to-be, too, was Irish and English, Protestant (Church of Ireland),
and lower middle class, having been orphaned at five and taken in by her
grandfather. Irene (Rene)* Richardson had a beautiful singing voice and had
begun to establish herself in the Dublin opera scene when she met Hughes
Murdoch, now back in Ireland. It would later bother their daughter Iris more
than it ever bothered Hughes or Rene that Rene had given up singing after she
and Hughes fell in love, conceived Iris, and married. Within a couple of
years, they left behind the fraught political situation in Ireland and moved
back to London. Hughes landed a good-enough clerical position in the
Ministry of Health, and that was that.

45
 Hughes and Rene were thus displaced persons—a category that would
fascinate and attract Iris throughout her life. However sensible—even
welcome—it was to get away from the War of Independence and its
aftermath, the Murdochs faced intense prejudice back in England. Anti-Irish
prejudice, like anti-black prejudice, was strong even later than anti-Catholic
prejudice (as Peter Conradi notes, landlords put up signs, into the 1950s,
reading “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish”), and the English did not always
distinguish between Irish Protestants and the Catholics whom they especially
despised.
Apart from their extended families back in Ireland, whom they saw during
the summers on holiday, Iris’s parents were largely cut off from the world.
Hughes, an unassuming man, went to the office, did his work, and returned
home. Rene looked after their daughter, puttered indifferently around the
house and, once Iris was in school, joined a local choir and a swimming
club. Even before the war, Hughes had become a freethinker, and though
Rene sang Sunday-school songs to young Iris, she did not press the matter.
She sang Irish Nationalist songs, too, without any more-fervent commitment.
The Murdochs had no church. They had no party. They had no friends.
Instead, they turned inward and made their home their world. Hughes doted
on Rene, who adored him in return. They both doted on Iris, their only child.
Hughes read Iris Treasure Island and other adventure stories, and Rene sang
her songs. Iris later recalled her family as “a perfect trinity of love.”11
Hughes’ income was a modest £400 a year, but it sufficed; the Murdochs
had only a few priorities. They put most of their resources into their small,
semi-detached house in Chiswick and into Iris’s schooling. This was initially
at the experimental (even eccentric) Froebel Demonstration School, near the
Murdochs’ home. Hughes would bring Iris to school on his way to work,
giving them extra time together. At Froebel, in addition to all the standard
subjects and some study of “affairs” (contemporary politics), there were
elaborate put-ons of courtly life, overseen by the headmistress, Miss Bain
(a.k.a. “King Bain”), with Knights, Ladies, Squires, and Dames arrayed
beneath. This involved a great deal of dress-up and solemn ritual. It sounds
comic, but Iris loved it, and it is not difficult to see how, together with all the
Robert Louis Stevenson and Lewis Carroll at home, it began to prepare her
for a life spent as much in fiction as in philosophy. One of her first pieces of
creative writing was “a fairy play with a chorus for rabbits,”12 probably
performed at a school concert.

46
 Like many families who build their world around an only child, what they
couldn’t face was childhood’s end: Hughes and Iris especially. When the
time came for Iris to leave Froebel, and she won a scholarship to a good
boarding school (Badminton), the rupture was terrible. Scrutton had been
mildly apprehensive about her transition to boarding school, but quickly fell
in love with the surrounding woods and Miss Willis and the library. Iris, by
contrast, “ran round and round the playground with her hair all over her face,
weeping,” then went and cried in a cloakroom.13 A kind classmate
witnessing her misery formed a small society for “The Prevention of Cruelty
to Iris.”14 Only Iris’s absolute faith in Hughes, who was no less miserable
but believed that Badminton School was what Iris needed, saw her through.
On holidays, the family would count down their remaining meals together.
♦♦♦♦
Badminton was what Iris needed. The young woman who took Oxford by
storm six years later is unimaginable apart from the influence of Badminton
headmistress Beatrice May Baker, known to her pupils as “BMB.”
Baker was a tough, weather-beaten woman, disciplined and demanding,
one who lived by her ideals—feminist, Quaker, Socialist—and (sometimes)
brought them alive for others. Baker began each day with a cold bath at 7:15
and made her pupils do the same. She did not force her own vegetarianism on
students, but they were served vegetarian meals twice a week. Once, in a
school chapel service, she preached against hot-water bottles. “We were
Athenians but we were Spartans too,” Murdoch would later recall.15
Baker’s imperious demands were not limited to physical discipline. She
would swoop down on unsuspecting students and ask what they were
reading, to see if it was worthy. “Fill your lives!” she told students and staff
alike. (“If I fill my life any more I shall go mad” one staffer muttered in
reply.)16
However difficult Baker could be, she also inspired some—Murdoch
among them—by her pure commitment to a vision of the Good. Baker was a
zealous proponent of the League of Nations, and strong-armed her pupils into
joining the Junior League. Murdoch’s first visit to continental Europe was a
school trip to the Palace of Nations in Geneva. Baker’s idealism took more
down-to-earth forms, too. As the 1930s wore on, she brought a stream of
refugee students (“foreign friends”) to Badminton. Baker modeled for
Murdoch the kind of absolute devotion to causes that Murdoch would later

47
emulate. Murdoch’s unyielding undergraduate Communism is a direct
inheritance from BMB, in tone if not in substance. Baker was also the first
person besides her father Hughes to whom Murdoch attached herself, the way
she would go on to attach herself to MacKinnon and other mentor figures
afterward. Murdoch remained close to her former headmistress for the rest of
Baker’s life—Murdoch seeking Baker’s approval in the 1950s before she
married literature scholar John Bayley.

EXCURSUS: THE MORBID AGE

In her sixties, Murdoch published a poem in a book of remembrances about

Baker. Early in the poem, she writes, “Pure idealism was what you had to
give,/Like no one now tells people how to live.” She likens what Baker
demanded of her pupils to summiting Everest: “How could we have
considered this ascent/Had not our cynic hearts adjudged you innocent?” But
then the poem takes a somber turn:
Politics too seemed innocent at that time
When we believed there would be no more war.
...
We lived through the jazz age with golden eyes
Reflecting what we thought was the sunrise.17
Murdoch was recalling her girlhood at a distance of half a century, but the
elegiac tone was no less emblematic of the late 1930s. Grief over the
twilight of civilization was one of the defining marks of the culture of
Anscombe, Bosanquet, Murdoch, and Scrutton’s childhood and adolescence.
The interwar years in Britain were, in Richard Overy’s phrase, a “morbid
age.”18
Revolutionary Marxists celebrated this idea of the nighttime of
civilization. Most people who spoke of it evinced dread. But they shared
with the revolutionaries a powerful sense of living fin de siècle. Medical
metaphors (senescence, disease, death) emerged as a common language
through which to articulate this sense. Consider these titles published
between 1919 and Hitler’s rise to power in 1933: The Decline of the West
(1922), The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization (1923), Will
Civilisation Crash? (1927), The Day After To-Morrow: What is Going to
Happen to the World? (1928), The Problems of Decadence (1931), Can We
Save Civilisation? (1932). The decline and fall of the West was not merely
an elite preoccupation, either. The public-minded BBC gave a broad hearing

48
to the doomsday prophecies of scholars like Albert Schweitzer, Oswald
Spengler, and Arnold Toynbee. There were popular treatments, too, like H.G.
Wells’s The Salvaging of Civilization (1921).
The power of the theme was its flexibility, its capacity to engage people of
radically different circumstances and convictions. There was no widely
accepted set of causes or symptoms for civilizational decline, other than the
Great War. “Civilization in crisis” was a banner under which Communists
and Christians, eugenicists and pacifists, psychoanalysts and traditionalists,
could march together. The rhetoric—the metaphor—united them, without
anyone having to agree on its meaning. Was the problem the collapse of
capitalism, pollution of the genetic pool, the impending destruction of
humanity due to ever-more-terrifying military technologies, or something else
altogether? This was the subject of vigorous argument. What was agreed on
all sides was that something had gone wrong with the West—a sickness had
taken hold—and the prognosis was uncertain at best.
Anscombe, Bosanquet, Murdoch, and Scrutton grew up, then, in a culture
that understood itself as unstable, living between an unprecedented outbreak
of ferocity and something worse to come. Perhaps the morbid anxieties of
1920s and 1930s Britain were a neurotic-if-understandable response to the
first war and the social transformations surrounding it. Perhaps they were
vindicated by the outcome. These anxieties were, regardless, what the
daughters of middle-class and upper-class professionals—school teachers,
vicars, civil servants, engineers—would have encountered in magazines and
books, and heard on the radio, from the pulpit, from their teachers. They
were a consistent background, the basso continuo of the interwar era.
♦♦♦♦
As Anscombe, Murdoch, and Scrutton began their secondary education in the
early 1930s, things really did begin to tip: the Japanese invasion of
Manchuria, Hitler’s ascent, the Italo-Abyssinian war, the Spanish civil war,
the run-up to a second world war. The whole of Britain—especially those,
like Miss Baker and the Scruttons, who were politically engaged—waited
with increasing apprehension on the outcome. The controlling metaphor also
began to shift, from sickness to a precipice: On the Rim of the Abyss (1935),
Europe Into the Abyss (1938), Europe: Going, Going, Gone! (1939).
How did this sense of impending doom manifest in the lives of young
women like Scrutton or Murdoch? In addition to working on her Greek and

49
Latin, Scrutton traveled in the year before she went up to Oxford. Her
beloved teacher Jean Rowntree urged upon her and her parents the timeliness
of learning German. Travel to Germany itself was out of the question. But the
Scruttons knew a Jewish family in Vienna, the Jerusalems. The Jerusalems’
daughter Lilli had spent a season with the Scruttons, and Mary’s brother
Hugh had stayed with the Jerusalems in return. So off Mary went to the
Austrian capital in March 1938—just in time for the Anschluss. Overnight,
she recalled, “huge red floating banners marked with swastikas appeared at
once, as if by magic . . . . Jewish shops . . . were marked crudely in white
paint and were quickly targeted by vandals who looted and smashed
everything they could reach. Broken glass was everywhere.”19 When Herr
Professor Jerusalem was arrested, the Jerusalems dispatched Mary—who
had less to fear in the streets—to the offices of a local Quaker group, to see
if they could do anything for him.
The Jerusalems survived; Mary’s parents were instrumental in resettling
them after Professor Jerusalem was lucky enough to be released. None of
what she had seen in Vienna was a surprise to Mary, though. As the daughter
of Thomas and Lesley, Mary had spent countless childhood evenings in
conversation with refugees. She “knew how these things were done.”20 But
as she—and Murdoch—first went up to Oxford that fall, it was with a sense
of standing at the lip of an abyss. And in their hunger for a healing, restoring
cause—a remedy for the morbidity afflicting their society—they were
daughters of their time.

“SHE DOESN’T LOOK CLEVER”

The daughters of 1919 grew up, too, in a fundamentally altered legal and
institutional context.
The mobilization of millions of British men during the Great War had led
or even compelled women to leave a limited range of previously
“acceptable” occupations—domestic service, dressmaking, laundering,
nursing, teaching, and above all homemaking—for jobs in civil service,
emergency services, farming, transportation, and munitions manufacturing.
The eventual return of more than five million men of working age, then, was
an economic crisis at least as serious as their departure had been. Large
groups of women were dismissed from positions they had held during the
war. No doubt some were pleased to be done handling explosives or

50
working in fields, but many who had enjoyed the greater freedom of the war
years were frustrated at being told they had to give up their wartime
occupations and the pay that accompanied them. Fewer and fewer women
were willing to do domestic work, and with (often informal) “marriage bars”
excluding married women from some lines of work, the unhappily
unemployed now included many women as well as men.
There isn’t a simple, causal relationship between this fraught situation and
the string of egalitarian legislative and institutional changes that took place
between 1918 and 1920. These changes wouldn’t have taken place without
decades of preparatory work by activists. But it is equally unbelievable that
there was no connection. In a two-year period, propertied women of 30 were
accorded the right to vote (1918); the Sex Disqualification Act made it
illegal to exclude (unmarried) women with comparable qualifications from
the major professions (1919); Viscountess Nancy Astor was the first woman
seated in Parliament (1919);21 the report of the War Cabinet Committee on
Women in Industry advocated the principle of equal pay for equal work
(1919); and women were welcomed as full members of the University of
Oxford and permitted to take degrees (1920). In retrospect, these changes
look simultaneously like an acknowledgment that women had proved
themselves and like a conciliatory gesture, as both private and public action
(such as the 1919 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act) pushed women out
of roles they had come to occupy and often prize.
Whatever the motivations behind these reforms, and however delayed or
incomplete their effects, they did fundamentally alter the position of women
in British society. They established a general presumption of legal and
institutional equality. Women like Scrutton, Murdoch, and Anscombe, born
shortly after the end of the war, were the first to grow up under this
presumption. There was, for them, no need to adjust to the idea that women
were allowed (in principle) to pursue any educational or professional goal
they wished. They were the first generation of women who could, mostly,
take this for granted.
♦♦♦♦
Philippa Bosanquet, however, could not. Her parents belonged to the world
that was passing away. Not only was there no expectation that she would
pursue educational or professional goals; there was every expectation that
she would not.22

51
 William Bosanquet, Philippa’s father, came from an old and distinguished
family. Huguenots, they fled France after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes (1685) and quickly established themselves on the other side of the
Channel. They are featured in books like Burke’s Peerage and The
Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal, Being a Complete Table of All the
Descendants Now Living of Edward III, King of England.
William was a younger son of a younger son, and so did not inherit an
estate. Like his father, though, he went to Cambridge and afterward secured a
prominent, well-paying position: in William’s case, as an engineer and
supervisor at a steelworks. He made a good marriage too, to Esther
Cleveland, daughter of United States President Grover Cleveland (and the
only baby ever born in the White House). William and Esther’s daughter,
however uncomfortable she became with the culture of her parents, never
forgot that she was the granddaughter of a US president and never ceased to
be intrigued by her mother’s family history. William and Esther met in
Switzerland in 1915; they became engaged late in 1917 after Esther came to
London to work as a nurse at a military hospital. Their marriage at
Westminster Abbey on March 14, 1918 was reported on both sides of the
Atlantic.
Both Philippa’s parents had seen something of the war, then. So decades
later, in 1942, when William lost his position, they were not too grand to
accommodate themselves to reality. They rented out most of their country
house (“the Old Hall”) in Yorkshire for storage and took up market
gardening. Scrutton visited the Old Hall in that period, and recalled an
atmosphere of moth-eaten grandeur. Throughout Philippa’s childhood, though,
the Bosanquets were distinctly upper-class, with strict ideas about how (and
with whom) to conduct themselves. It was proper for Philippa and her sister
Marion to befriend Victoria Gore, daughter to a Lady in Waiting, or
Rosemary Vane of Raby Castle, but not the children of the local physician.
Also not proper for Philippa and Marion: formal education.
Indeed, all the primary and secondary education Philippa received—apart
from one miserable year at the socially elite St. George’s School, Ascot—
was in her parents’ home. Not that she was, in the contemporary sense,
home-schooled. Her parents had no role in her schooling. They saw her only
a few hours a day, even when she was desperately sick. As was customary in
their circle, William and Esther turned over Philippa and Marion to a nanny,
Jennie Baxter, who became like a mother to them both. They were

52
subsequently put in the charge of governesses. Philippa would later remark in
an interview, perhaps too flatly: “I had no education . . . . In this milieu,
women didn’t go to school. They just had a succession of governesses, who
didn’t know anything . . . .”23
So Philippa and Marion got only basic arithmetic and literacy (though
Philippa’s spelling and handwriting would be lifelong sources of
embarrassment to her), French, and the most baroque details of etiquette.
Forbidden as they were to play with the children of the village, they spent
much of their time in the traditional pursuits of their class: attending dressy
occasions with “the great and the good,” going on outings with Nanny, and—
above all—riding horses, including in the annual fox hunt.
It is impressive that Philippa managed to do as much riding as she did,
given the variety of ailments that afflicted her as a child. Together with her
TB, she suffered from ear infections. A botched operation on the kitchen
table left her permanently deaf in one ear. Small wonder that Nietzsche
(“What does not destroy me, makes me stronger”)24 later became one of her
favorite authors. Despite everything, young Philippa was an accomplished
equestrian. In her riding, as in the brutal winter she spent outside the nursery
window, she was forced early to develop inner strength. Years later, in a
journal, she mused, “How did they allow a child who was perhaps not even
as much as 10 to get up and go out alone [on horseback]? . . . No one seems
to have thought to ask ‘Does that child know how to ride?’ when they bought
a half-broken-in 2-yr.-old pony at the fair!” But then, she observed, “I
suppose that was how M[arion] & I grew so tough!”25
What Philippa conspicuously lacked was a deep connection with her
parents—though, like most children, she wanted one. But she had neither the
closeness of Murdoch with her parents nor the admiration with which
Scrutton regarded hers. The connection Murdoch felt with her parents,
Bosanquet felt with her nanny. She and her sister used to leave notes for
Baxter in the armpit of their teddy bear. In a late journal entry, Philippa
wrote, “Nanny loved me so very much. Never to be forgotten: the look on her
face—as if something unbelievably wonderful had happened—when I
walked up to her bed in University College Hospital after her stroke.”26 As
Philippa herself lay dying, she said, “Nanny’s waiting for me.”27
Philippa’s letters home from London during the latter half of the Second
World War survive. They are chatty, witty, faultlessly polite, even effusive

53
(“Lots & lots of love to you dear chickens”), but also guarded.28 Later in life,
Philippa mourned her parents deeply. The terrible sadness is that her love
was almost certainly reciprocated, though its expression was constrained by
expectations of how upper-class parents behaved. We have Philippa’s letters
to her mother because Esther kept them, among the things she took with her
when she moved back to the United States after William’s death. Marion
found them when settling Esther’s estate. “[Why] were we so
overwhelmingly convinced,” Philippa wrote in her journal, “that she didn’t
care about us?”29
This highlights the central puzzle of Philippa’s childhood: what led her,
even before she left home, to set herself against the class-consciousness of
her parents—first by applying to university, and later in other ways? Was it
seeing comparatively little of them, even as she fought her way through
sickness after sickness? Was it a temperamental mismatch: simply not liking
the world into which she was being initiated? Philippa did fantasize from
early childhood about leaving home. A notebook of juvenilia is preserved in
her papers. The bulk of it is given to a long, rambling, largely unpunctuated
story about two children, Tom (6) and Mary (5): “TOM AND MARY WERE
REALLY VERY NICE CHILDREN BUT THEY WERE GREEDY AND
SPOILT MARY WAS SPOILT AND TOM WAS GREEDY MARY HAD A
BUNNY AND TOM A PONY THEY WERE VERY HAPPY.” The story
begins at Christmastime; the great excitement on Christmas morning is the
announcement from their mother, Mrs. Hall, that she’s sending them both
away to school, Tom to “the Priory,” Mary to “the Nunery” [sic].30
Perhaps it was all of this, plus a positive attraction to the vision projected
by her last governess. She “actually had a degree” and said to Philippa, “you
could go to university, you know”—mapping out for her the work she would
need to do to pass Responsions.31 Philippa’s parents didn’t understand, but
also didn’t try to stop her. Her mother did fret to a friend about what would
become of her baby, doing something so common. Her friend consoled her:
“Never mind, dear. She doesn’t look clever.”32
♦♦♦♦
Philippa Bosanquet plunged into her correspondence work, terrified that she
would not meet the standard but desperate to escape. No one could have
wanted Oxford more or been more willing to suffer for it. She learned of a

54
woman—a Mrs. Muir of 2 Bradmore Road, Oxford—who coached women
for the University entrance exams. She moved to Oxford in 1938, then, at the
same time as Scrutton and Murdoch, though she was a year younger. As
Scrutton and Murdoch were being lectured by Vera Farnell about the need to
preserve Somerville’s reputation, Bosanquet and her new friend Anne Cobbe
were revising and revising, hoping to be in Murdoch and Scrutton’s shoes the
following fall.
Someone—the same governess?—had told Bosanquet that Somerville was
known among Oxford’s women’s colleges for being “intellectually but not
socially snobby.” That suited her perfectly.33 On her application, Bosanquet
expressed interest in being a writer, or perhaps a social worker. Philosophy
she only discovered when she was sent to MacKinnon the following year.
Her Latin may have been merely adequate and her mathematics little better.
But like Scrutton and Murdoch, she wrote a stunning general paper, on
liberalism—Somerville classics tutor Mildred Hartley still recalled it, 30
years later—and won a scholarship she didn’t need.

MISS ANSCOMBE AGAIN

Anscombe could have easily never come into this story.

She was a year ahead of Murdoch and Scrutton and at a different college,
was taught mostly by different tutors, and from her first weeks at Oxford
gravitated to a small community of young Catholics and catechumens
centered on Blackfriars Priory.34 The Somervillians saw Anscombe at
meetings of the Jowett Society, which she attended faithfully. And her
friendship with Jean Coutts brought her to Somerville from time to time.
(Anscombe was at St. Hugh’s very little, it seems. On one occasion, she was
called up before the Principal, Miss Gwyer, for dining too seldom in
College.35) Anscombe was an impressive figure, but existed mostly at the
periphery of Scrutton and Murdoch’s world. She was unlike them, too, in that
she was a philosopher before she ever set foot in Oxford.
St. Hugh’s was the first among the women’s colleges to hire a fellow in
philosophy, Old Somervillian Mary Glover. Only Lady Margaret Hall had
followed suit by 1937. But soon after the war began, Glover began sending
Anscombe to tutors in other colleges for most subjects: perhaps because the
St. Hugh’s site had been requisitioned for a military hospital, perhaps

55
because Glover thought Anscombe needed more than she could provide.* Her
tutors’ reports offer a vivid picture of her talent and temperament at ages 20–
21.
Anscombe’s Greek history tutor in the fall of 1939 could get no
satisfactory answer from her as to why she had not read the assigned portions
of Herodotus over the long vacation, and noted that she couldn’t be bothered
even with the smaller passages she was supposed to be reading week to
week. Her father had died of cancer in late August, which seems explanation
enough.36 But if Anscombe was incapacitated rather than simply uninterested,
the debility passed quickly. That year, she and her friend Norman Daniel
wrote and published a pamphlet criticizing the British government’s official
justifications for the new war.37 And that winter, Donald MacKinnon tutored
her in Plato and found her work excellent.38
Anscombe remained consistently inconsistent for the rest of her
undergraduate career. In Trinity term 1940, her tutor in modern philosophy
fretted about her “reluctance to give the necessary attention to philosophers
who repel her by their personality and/or their writings.” The following
term, her logic tutor, Martha Kneale, had nothing but praise for her capacity
and dedication.39 This oscillation came to a head in her final examinations in
June 1941. Her philosophy papers were excellent—notwithstanding that she
had been thumbing through Hobbes for the first time on the eve of her
political theory paper. Her Greek history paper, thanks to some remedial
work with Marcus Tod of Oriel, was acceptable, but her Roman history
paper was bad. This led to a viva in which Anscombe simply froze. One of
her examiners reportedly asked, “Is there a single fact about the period you
are supposed to have studied of which you are able to inform your
examiners?” As Michael Dummett remarks, for the philosophy examiners to
have prevailed on their historian colleagues to give Anscombe a first, “her
philosophy papers must have been astonishing.”40
Already in her teens, Anscombe was drawn to philosophy, not knowing yet
what it was. When she read Boedder’s Natural Theology, she found she
could not get the questions and arguments it raised out of her head. In
particular, she found herself unable to stop puzzling about an argument
Boedder made for the claim that “anything that comes about must have a
cause.”41 Anscombe wrote:

56
 the proof had the fault of proceeding from a barely concealed assumption of its own conclusion. I
thought that this was some sort of carelessness on the part of the author, and that it just needed
tidying up. So I started writing improved versions of it; each one satisfied me for a time, but then
reflection would show me that I had committed the same fault. . . . I tore them up when I found
they were no good, and I went round asking people why, if something happened, they would be
sure it had a cause. No one had an answer to this. In two or three years of effort I produced five
versions of a would-be proof . . . . In all this time I had no philosophical teaching about the
matter.42

She was frequently gripped by philosophical questions in this way. She

attended Professor H.H. Price’s lectures about perception before philosophy
was even one of her subjects, and quickly became obsessed with the issues
Price raised. As she recalled: “for years, I would spend time, in cafés, for
example, staring at objects saying to myself: ‘I see a packet. But what do I
really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow
expanse?’ ” She treasured Price’s lectures—though, as she wrote, “not
because I agreed with him.” On the contrary: “I used to sit tearing my gown
into little strips because I wanted to argue against so much that he said.”43
If any of these women was certain to end up in philosophy, like the
isolated figures of the preceding decades—Susan Stebbing, Dorothy Emmet,
Mary Glover, Martha Kneale—it was Anscombe. Likewise, if any of them
was more or less invulnerable to being turned aside by bad teaching—if
there was one who needed no one to inspire her—it was Anscombe.
Combative, uncomfortable in the role of a leader, she was nonetheless the
one to whom the Somervillians would later look for inspiration, the one they
were most eager to hear speak when they all made their way back to Oxford
after the war. There, as graduate students, they began meeting in Philippa and
Michael Foot’s parlor at 16 Park Town. They began asking whether they had
to believe what Ayer said about ethics—and what anyone might say instead.
They weren’t the only ones returning to Oxford after the war, though, and
wondering how to go beyond Ayer. There was also an ambitious,
conscientious, haunted prisoner of war, against whom they would define
themselves for decades.

* Anscombe related to Mary Midgley a childhood memory of sitting in her family’s back garden in a
stick-built fort, feeling furious. As one of the twins started clambering in, she thought, “do I have
a log I can whack him with?” (Mary Midgley, conversation with author, March 7, 2011.)

57
* Taken literally, rather than as a metaphor for existential disorientation, the label is an exaggeration. I
do not belittle the effects of the war. But the British specifically lost around 700,000 troops in the
conflict—roughly 12% of their mobilized force. Nearly everyone lost a friend or family member.
The casualty rate among junior officers was especially high, around 17%. Nevertheless, 1919
saw a record number of marriages in England, Scotland, and Wales. This would have been
impossible if the great majority of the forces had not returned. It is not astonishing that A.W.
Anscombe, W.S.B. Bosanquet, W.J.H. Murdoch, and T.B. Scrutton all survived. The odds of
four randomly selected junior officers all surviving the war were roughly even.
* Pronounced “ree-nee.”
* Somerville faced a similar (though less dramatic) fate, as the building where Scrutton lived in 1938–
39 was appropriated the following year to house nurses from the Radcliffe Infirmary. (A few
rooms on the ground floor were sectioned off for use by medical students. This area was known
around Somerville for years to come as “the Isle of Man.”) Scrutton and 30 others were sent to
lodge in available rooms at Lady Margaret Hall for the 1939–40 academic year.

58
 Chapter 4

The Coming Philosophers

TWO WARS (I)

Late spring is the hot season in Thailand. Temperatures can clear 100
degrees, day after day. And in May 1943, along the Kwae Noi valley, they
did. That’s when Richard Hare and a party of fellow British officers were
packed into box cars and sent from the large POW camp in Singapore to
work on the Burma-Thailand railway.1
Work on the railway had begun in mid-1942. After the Allies established
naval supremacy at the Battle of Midway, Japan needed to send troops and
supplies overland in support of their campaign in Burma. The proposed route
for the railway—along the Kwae Noi river then up and over the Three
Pagodas Pass—was unattractive from an engineering standpoint, but was the
best available option. It would connect Rangoon and Bangkok and thus the
existing Burmese and Thai rail systems. As 1943 began, and Japanese forces
were defeated again at Guadalcanal, the railway project took on increased
urgency. Others—chiefly Australian POWs and conscripted locals—had
been pounding along for months. Now, fearing what loss of time might mean,
Imperial Japanese Army commanders began putting to work every prisoner
they held: no matter how unwell, no matter if they had tools, or boots, or
food.
♦♦♦♦
Hare and the other officers of the 22nd Mountain Regiment had not been
treated well at the Changi jail camp, where they were sent in February 1942.
They were underfed. They were subject to disease and abuse. But life at
Changi wasn’t wretched. Temperatures by the sea weren’t brutally hot (and
were never cold). And as long as they didn’t try to escape, the POWs were
often left at their leisure.

59
 Not for nothing had Hare been the top classical scholar at Rugby School
and then at Balliol College, Oxford. He spent his first 15 months at Changi
“improving [his] Urdu, learning some more languages (Persian and Italian),”
attending lectures by fellow prisoners, singing in a church choir, growing
vegetables they needed but were not getting otherwise—and writing a book.2
The book wouldn’t have happened without a stroke of luck. After the fall
of Singapore, it took the Japanese Army several days to get organized and
arrange for direct supervision of their thousands of new prisoners; defeated
Allied soldiers were told to go to Changi jail and wait. (There was no point
in fleeing; they were 1500 miles from the nearest Allied territory.) While
they waited, Hare nabbed “a beautiful ledger” from the prison office and
began to record his philosophy.3 When Hare was ordered to join the work
gangs on the railway, over a year later, he strapped the ledger to his back, the
way others packed Bibles or pictures of loved ones. Hare had few loved
ones. His next of kin was the uncle who had taken him in when he was
orphaned at 15. Hare carried his book.
On the ride to Bangkok, in terrible heat, having eaten almost nothing, Hare
saw something remarkable. An air-conditioned passenger train pulled up next
to the box cars holding Hare and his fellow prisoners. Directly across from
him, framed in one of its windows, “as if in an aquarium, was a young
Japanese officer, eating an excellent meal with an air of exquisite
refinement.” Hare would later recall this as a decisive moment in his life. He
had been stationed in India before he was sent to Singapore; he reflected how
the poor in India “must sometimes . . . have seen me myself doing the same.”4
♦♦♦♦
The march up the Kwae Noi valley was almost the end of him. Hare
estimated that 20 to 40 percent of those who traveled with him from
Singapore died and were buried near the grade. Allied medical officers were
typically allowed to hold back a few men each day from bushwhacking, from
blasting and hauling rock, from carrying baskets of soil. But their overseers
also set quotas and limited exemptions. Under increasing pressure from
Tokyo, they sent out the “able” (sometimes including those who couldn’t
keep food down) for shifts of up to 18 hours, working on rations of fewer
than 1000 calories a day—mostly maggoty rice. They sometimes had eggs or
rancid meat to eat, seldom any vegetables. Their medics sometimes had
supplies to treat the men’s dysentery and malaria and septic sores, sometimes

60
not. Those who weren’t sent out for heavy work were sometimes pressed
into service digging pit toilets (“benjos”) with the crudest tools, or with their
hands. They were beaten for not doing what they were told, or sometimes for
no reason at all.
The worst of the heat passed. Monsoon season began. Dozens of men were
crowded into each tent, water coming through the roofs, water rising beneath
the bamboo pallets where they slept, campsites and worksites turned to mud.
Disease in camp increased. Hare willed himself to live. Whenever he was
released from work, if he could lift his head and had something with which to
write, he penned a few more lines of his book. Decades later, after Hare’s
death, a fellow soldier wrote to Hare’s family, saying that Hare had kept him
alive—by example and by encouragement. Hare and his fellow prisoners met
at night and prayed Psalm 57, as it appears in the Book of Common Prayer:
“They have laid a net for my feet, and pressed down my soul: they have
digged a pit before me, and are fallen into the midst of it themselves. . . . Set
up thyself, O God, above the heavens: and thy glory above all the earth.”
Somehow, Hare and his book made it back to Singapore. He appended the
following epigraph, from the Greek soldier-poet Archilochus:
My spirit, my spirit, tumulted by griefs beyond repair—
But rise—set yourself to face the foes that dash against;
your heart, as enemies array to hem you in,
plant steadfast! And neither in victory openly exult,
nor in defeat collapse into wails at home,
but rather delight in the delightful, and in anxious grief
be moderate: recognize the rhythm that bears along human lives.5

TWO WARS (II)

Within a few weeks of the railway’s completion, as Hare was returned to

Singapore to try to recover his strength, Philippa Bosanquet moved into Iris
Murdoch’s London flat.6
Murdoch leased the flat in September 1942, almost as soon as she arrived
in London for her wartime assignment. It was a remarkable place. Number 5
Seaforth Place, known to Bosanquet and Murdoch for the rest of their lives
simply as “Seaforth,” was the top floor of an abandoned warehouse and
stables once used by a cluster of local brewers. There was no number 1, 2, 3,
or 4: just the one door off a tiny alley. A steep, open stairway led up to a

61
huge storage area above the old stables, and then up again to a barely divided
living space (there was one large archway, with a curtain strung across). The
space had had various functions over time: granary, hayloft, a place to sleep
for grooms without other lodgings.
With a leaky greenhouse roof over “the kitchen” (that is, the space
adjoining the stairs, where Murdoch set up an old gas oven) and “some six
square miles of window to guard in blitz and blackout,” the flat was blazing
in summer, freezing in winter.7 There was no running water except in the
bathroom beneath the stairs, which doubled as a shelter during air raids. The
only heat came from the oven and a small gas space-heater; warmth bled
away through the windows and through cracks in the ceiling. Murdoch
acquired a few bookshelves, a table and chairs, and a pair of armchairs. She
slept on a cot. The rest of the furniture was orange-crates. A friend later
described it as “like a stage set for a school performance of something by
Dostoevsky.”8 The District line of the London Underground ran directly
beneath the building. As trains came and went, Seaforth would rumble and
shiver like the Bankses’ house in Mary Poppins.
The first part of 1943 was “hellishly lonely” for Murdoch. In the fall of
1942, Mary Scrutton had been working in London; she and Murdoch had met
regularly for lunch. Then Scrutton requested release from her position at the
Ministry of Production to go teach at her old school, Downe House. The
Ministry had been a bad fit. Scrutton’s supervisor hadn’t known how best to
use her, and the tense atmosphere of an office where she was irritably
dismissed whenever she asked for direction began to affect Scrutton’s
digestion. So now she was gone. Murdoch had exchanged letters with
Bosanquet, beginning to cultivate their friendship further. But Bosanquet was
still in Oxford, assisting her former tutor (now boyfriend), Hungarian
economist Thomas Balogh. Murdoch went up to visit Bosanquet and Donald
MacKinnon when she could. She steeled herself to a silent “yes” as she
passed the signs posted on every railway platform: “Is your journey really
necessary?” All the young men she had known at Oxford were now at war.
She wrote to some of them—particularly Frank Thompson, to whom she was
increasingly attached. (Thompson would be killed in Bulgaria in 1944.) For
someone whose university life had been overflowing with friendship and
discovery, it was a profoundly alienating time.
In late January 1943, Murdoch wrote to Thompson, first in a comic spirit
about how the mice at Seaforth Place were eating his letters (“I am not on

62
very good terms with the mice, and the fact that I have been careless enough
to leave valuables around where they could get at them can be chalked up as
a point to them”), but then with a vulnerability she seldom exposed in
correspondence: “I wish you would come home . . . you and the others. . . .
[I’m] oh so much in need of intellectual intimacy. The patient mind which is
prepared to comprehend my own and toss me back the ball of my own
thought.” She was reading and trying to write, she said, but finding both
difficult. With affected casualness, she remarked that she had “parted
company with [her] virginity,” but added that she didn’t love the man.9 She
had written earlier to Bosanquet that she felt “like going out and picking up
the first man I meet that’s willing, simply for the sake of a more intense
relationship of any description with another human being.”10 She saw lots of
people in then-bohemian Fitzrovia, but connected deeply with none. She
offered herself as a low-level spy for the Communist Party, copying Treasury
documents and leaving them in a hollow tree in Kensington Gardens for a
fellow agent to collect.11 But that wasn’t friendship either. Fearful for
Thompson and others, salving the wound with sex, furtively passing along the
(mostly dull) documents to which she had access, Murdoch seemed to her
colleagues withdrawn.
Bosanquet’s arrival at Seaforth in October 1943 was water and life to
Murdoch. Now in London working for the Royal Institute of International
Affairs at Chatham House, assisting a group planning toward postwar
reconstruction, Bosanquet drew Murdoch out of isolation. Each offered
something to the other: Bosanquet brought laughter and conversation to
Seaforth. (She also brought more and better furniture.) For her part, Murdoch
led Bosanquet into worlds she longed to inhabit. Culture, for one. Even after
three years at Oxford, Bosanquet felt desperately undereducated. Murdoch
shared her own voracious reading with her new best friend. It was
Murdoch’s habit to grab a book and sink into an armchair immediately on
arriving home, and Bosanquet began doing the same. They read Dickens
together, and Proust, and Beckett. Bosanquet’s commonplace book from these
years is stuffed with quotes from authors who preoccupied Murdoch:
Bernanos, Buber, Gorki, Jung, Marcel, and Pascal. Above all, Kierkegaard.
Murdoch also took Bosanquet along to parties in Fitzrovia with Dylan
Thomas and Arthur Koestler—with whom Murdoch had (of course) struck up
casual acquaintanceships. Afterward, the women wended their way back

63
through the foggy streets or on the underground, navigating platforms packed
with refugees from the bombed-out East End.
Murdoch welcomed Bosanquet, too, into a frugal, even spartan life that
was the antithesis of everything Bosanquet had known growing up. On
Bosanquet’s first night at Seaforth, Murdoch told her that once the lights were
off, she could use the blackout cloth over the greenhouse glass as a blanket;
they didn’t have others. They sometimes went to bed in their coats, with hot-
water bottles at their feet, as Seaforth barely kept the weather out. That
winter, Bosanquet wrote to her mother, “the fog even in this room is so thick
that I can but dimly discern Iris across the other side.”12 They shared shoes,
and wore them out, and then walked around in bad shoes. On their days off,
they queued for rush tickets to see the opera or the ballet. Bosanquet began to
feel, for the first time in her life, both cultured and unfussy. When a V2 rocket
destroyed several houses nearby, blowing out their windows, the women
laughed and laughed when the alarm clock rang five minutes later. They
headed off to work that morning, picking their way across the new rubble,
seeing if anyone needed a hand.

HOMECOMINGS

Hare finished his book in September 1945, on a converted ocean liner sailing
home. Fighting recurring malaria, he plunged immediately back into his
studies. He too was a child of 1919; he had come up with Anscombe in 1937.
Like Anscombe (and Murdoch, and Scrutton), Hare read Greats. He had
taken his initial examinations in classical languages the winter before he
enlisted, but still had the second half of his course to complete. Like
Bosanquet—now Foot—who returned at the same time, Hare came back to
an Oxford very different from the one he had left.
♦♦♦♦
Nina Bawden, who lived through the transition, describes Oxford during and
after the war:

64
 In the autumn of 1943, Oxford slept in a strange and timeless silence. No bells rang in wartime,
from clock tower or steeple, and there was almost no traffic; the uncluttered curve of the High, the
spires of the colleges, slept in the clean, moist, quiet air as in some old don’s dream of peace.
When I went back to Oxford for my third and last year . . . Oxford was changing. The ex-
servicemen were coming back . . . seeming to us older than their actual years warranted, stern
purposeful men with wives and moustaches, taking over our university and reducing us, by their
middle-aged presence, to the status of schoolchildren. . . . Our streets, our cafés, our societies—
the whole of our playground was invaded by . . . soldiers and sailors and airmen; . . . the Radcliffe
Camera [a reading room for the Bodleian Library], so comfortably adequate for its reduced
wartime population, was busy as a mainline station at rush hour.13

The influx of ex-servicemen like Hare—both among the faculty and among
the students—was certainly the most dramatic change in the Oxford scene.
Oxford was once again crowded, and once again dominated by men. Once
more, as Scrutton later remarked, “a lot of good female thinking [was]
wasted because it simply [didn’t] get heard.”14 It is sad but unsurprising that
Oxford in the late 1940s trained no women who went on to do the kind of
work that Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Scrutton did. That would have to
wait until their generation (and others who came up just after them, like Mary
Warnock) established themselves in the women’s colleges and began
mentoring other young women. The return of male dominance in shared
spaces was one factor. Another was a shift away from the close mentoring
relationships that enabled Foot, Murdoch, and Scrutton to imagine a life in
philosophy. This was as much a matter of circumstance as of prejudice. It
affected men as well as women—though the better-resourced men’s colleges
blunted the effect on their students. But the crowded streets and shops and
lecture halls meant that most students no longer received the one-on-one
tutorials that had been standard through the early 1940s.15
On the other hand, the swollen population also meant tremendous
enrichment for the mature students and younger faculty coming back: people
like Foot and Hare, and soon Scrutton and Murdoch. If combined tutorials
became more common, the lecture lists also became more expansive and
diverse. As Mary Warnock recalled, faculty “[came] back from the war with
their heads full of new books which, before they were written, could be tried
out in lectures.”16 Philosophy in particular saw a dramatic revival at Oxford.
In the final years of the war, the student-run Jowett Society typically drew
around 10 attendees per session. At the first meeting of Michaelmas term
1945, attendance leaped to 74. That was an early show of enthusiasm—
attendance at the next meeting was only 26—but subsequent meetings

65
continued to draw dramatically better than during wartime. There were
several spikes of 50 or more, even as the faculty-run Philosophical Society
began meeting separately for the first time since 1941.
Oxford was quickly becoming the most prominent center of philosophical
activity in the English-speaking world. Gilbert Ryle, Ayer’s old tutor and
now holder of one of the University’s three distinguished professorships in
philosophy, had everything to do with this. Before the war, as a fellow of
Christ Church College, Ryle used to coach crew as well as teach philosophy.
After the war, as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, he
brought the spirit he used to build teams of rowers to building a team of
philosophers instead. He approached the task no less competitively.17
Ryle disagreed with many of Ayer’s specific opinions but was convinced
that something like the critical analysis of language Ayer practiced was the
way of the future.18 As Hare recalled, Ryle “made it his business to secure
the many philosophical jobs that were then vacant for young philosophers of
a school that he thought most promising, the analytical.”19 Ryle further
promoted the kind of philosophy he valued as editor of one of the premier
journals in the discipline, Mind. The result, over the coming decade and a
half, was the establishment of a distinctive Oxford style: a style that would
become more sharply defined over time, especially after the 1952
appointment, on Ryle’s recommendation, of J.L. Austin to the White’s
Professorship of Moral Philosophy. I will consider the Oxford style more
closely in the next chapter.
There would have been a lot of philosophy going on, regardless. Due to
the inclusion of philosophy in two of Oxford’s best-known courses (Greats
and PPE), Oxford had always been home to an unusually large number of
philosophers—far more than Cambridge, which employed only a handful.
Philosophy at Oxford wasn’t just for people who wanted a philosophy
degree. All kinds of people whose real interests lay in politics or ancient
history ended up studying philosophy along the way, because it was part of
the package. PPE, in particular, grew in popularity after the war. Over time,
the sheer percentage of Britain’s national elite who had studied a little
philosophy at Oxford led to Oxford-style philosophy becoming a surprisingly
prominent topic of public conversation. In the short term, the percentage of
students at Oxford who studied philosophy meant that Oxford needed many,
many philosophy teachers.

66
 To cultivate candidates for these positions, Ryle designed and promoted a
new graduate course, the B.Phil. Instead of a long thesis, the new degree
required a series of examinations and a shorter thesis. The B.Phil. also took
just two years, and thus could quickly begin emitting a stream of young
philosophers with advanced training. The first term in which graduate
classes were listed alongside philosophy lectures was Michaelmas 1946. A
year later, there were five graduate classes advertised, up from three. A year
after that, there were eleven. The first B.Phil. degrees were awarded in
1948. But in the postwar years, Ryle and his colleagues also trusted their
instincts; they didn’t require the B.Phil. of the candidates they liked best.
Hare was hired to teach at his alma mater, Balliol College, immediately upon
completion of his undergraduate examinations in 1947. He was made a
fellow of Balliol shortly thereafter.
♦♦♦♦
Into this rich ferment—not yet resolved into anything dogmatic—first Foot
returned, then Scrutton, then Murdoch.
Foot returned to Somerville as a graduate student, working on a B.Litt. (the
B.Phil. was not yet available). Already in her first two years back, she took
pupils on the side. Her husband Michael was still finishing his degree, and
they needed the money. Foot was an impressive teacher from the first:
“meticulous, imaginative . . . inspiring.”20 In 1947, Somerville hired Foot as
a lecturer on a trial basis. Two years later, after she had taught herself enough
Greek to be able to tutor Greats pupils, the College elevated her to a
fellowship. Scrutton too returned to Oxford shortly after the war, though
initially she had no formal connection to the University. (From 1945–47, she
worked for retired classical scholar Gilbert Murray, assisting him with his
memoirs.) The same year Foot became a lecturer, Scrutton began a D.Phil.
thesis on the late-classical neo-Platonist, Plotinus. The year after that,
matching people with positions like a younger Gilbert Ryle, Foot managed to
find a place at St. Anne’s College, Oxford for Murdoch.
But Foot’s newest friend, the one who would shape her work the most
deeply, had never really left.
♦♦♦♦
Anscombe and Foot (then Bosanquet) probably became acquainted in 1941.
Anscombe had graduated but was still at St. Hugh’s, working on a D.Phil.

67
thesis about “Thomas Aquinas on the identity of bodies.”21 She was a busy
woman. She was also taking a few pupils and presiding over the Jowett
Society, which Bosanquet had finally joined. She was also preparing for her
wedding that December. Bosanquet and Anscombe were fixtures at the
Society for the next five terms, each reading papers with the other in
attendance. In Michaelmas 1942, Bosanquet was secretary of the Society and
ascended the following term (as was customary) to the presidency. For some
reason—another bout of ill health?—Bosanquet did not deliver the
traditional end-of-term presidential address. Anscombe stood in for her.
That year, Anscombe was awarded the Sarah Smithson studentship at
Newnham College, Cambridge. She continued to come and go from Oxford,
though, working on her thesis and teaching for St. Hugh’s and other colleges
even as she moved to Cambridge and began attending lectures by one of most
famous philosophers of the twentieth century: the intense, tormented Austrian
émigré Ludwig Wittgenstein. Teaching opportunities—more plentiful in
Oxford, even in wartime—were one reason for the coming and going. Like
the Foots after the war, Anscombe and her new husband, fellow philosopher
and fellow convert Peter Geach, needed all the money they could get. They
weren’t living together, except at brief intervals. Geach, a conscientious
objector, had been conscripted into timber production in lieu of military
service.22 Their first child Barbara was born in 1943. Then the Smithson
award ran out. Geach and Anscombe had found a landlord in Cambridge who
rented to poor families with children and let them sublet.23 Anscombe earned
enough by teaching to justify the commute, but the couple were poor—
especially toward the end of the war, when their second child arrived.24
Addicted to smoking, Anscombe sometimes retrieved cigarette stubs from the
pavement.25
In 1946, Anscombe “returned” to Oxford as the recipient of the Mary
Somerville Research Fellowship at Somerville College. She took lodgings in
Oxford while Geach remained in Cambridge. Once again, she found herself
commuting: to see her husband and children and to continue her studies with
Wittgenstein. And once again, they were poor. Geach did not work during
this period, except on his own philosophical research, which would bear
fruit in a string of influential articles in the 1950s. He minded the children
and studied logic. Anscombe pursued her research, participated in the life of
two universities and, by a special dispensation from the usual regulations

68
governing the Mary Somerville Fellowship, did a little teaching on the side.
In early 1948, Somerville Principal Janet Vaughan was approached by a
Philadelphia-based charity looking to send aid packages to “intelligent,
educated, white-collar [families] who . . . [had] been caught between the
fixed income and rising prices” of the postwar years. Vaughan offered
several names, but highlighted Anscombe as the neediest, describing the
family’s situation as “really rather desperate”: “the children need food,
clothing, and anything that can be sent for them.” She only warned her
correspondent that Anscombe was unlikely to satisfy “the wives of prominent
citizens” who hoped to receive photographs and letters from the objects of
their charity: “Miss Anscombe is an extremely brilliant philosopher, but . . .
[h]er mind only really works on the highest abstract problems, and I doubt if
she ever writes a letter to anybody.”*, 26
The Mary Somerville Research Fellowship was ostensibly for continued
work on Anscombe’s D.Phil. project—which she never submitted. She sent
with her application two complete theses as proof of her ability to produce
finished prose, and said that she had written a third. As she had spent her late
adolescence writing version after version of a proof that “anything that
comes about must have a cause,” she had spent the war years writing and
discarding versions of her doctoral thesis. She wrote, “I have been in great
difficulties in the attempt to bring my work . . . to a conclusion because my
philosophical ideas have undergone radical alterations in the last two years.”
She had not stopped thinking about ancient and modern conceptions of body
and soul, and in particular about “Aristotle’s concept of ‘life’.”27 But in the
meantime, she had found the person with whom she wanted to think through
these things: Wittgenstein. And as Wittgenstein’s apostle to Oxford, she
would help her friends see an alternative to the theory of ethics ascending
there: Hare’s.

BEYOND “BOO” AND “HURRAH”

Ethics was generally out of favor in the postwar Oxford scene—

notwithstanding how many ethical questions the war had raised. “Moral
philosophy was a despised subject,” Mary Warnock wrote, “though it had to
be taught because ‘Morals and Politics’ was a compulsory subject in both
Greats and PPE.”28

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 Part of the problem was Ayer. Whether or not they were sympathetic to his
ideas, no one thought they could philosophize about ethics anymore—or
about anything “metaphysical”—without addressing Ayer’s critique. Ayer’s
doctrine, again, was that things people say only have meaning when they
express either (1) definitions or rules of logic, or (2) actual or theoretically
possible observations. If you’re using words but not articulating definitions
or logic, and not talking about things you (or someone) could see, hear, taste,
smell, or touch, you’re not saying anything. Your words are meaningless.
The implication for ethical discourse, Ayer concluded, is that it is
meaningless. Moral judgments can show feelings of approval or disapproval.
But they can’t, strictly speaking, say anything. They are like cheers or boos at
a sporting event. A fan who boos an opposing player shows how he feels, but
he doesn’t make a claim. And if someone responds, “that’s false!” or “liar!”
they’re either joking or have misunderstood. A boo can’t be false (or true). It
can’t be a lie. It’s expressive, but lacks what philosophers call
“propositional content.”
Though Ayer himself didn’t liken ethical discourse to fan support, it
quickly became a common shorthand for his theory (or anti-theory) of ethics.
In January 1940, there was a discussion at the Jowett Society (MacKinnon
was one of the discussants) on “The Boo-Hurrah Theory of Moral
Judgments.” The more technical label for Ayer’s theory, taken from a drier,
duller elaboration by American philosopher Charles Stevenson, was
“emotivism.” Ethical language emotes, but is otherwise empty.
It wasn’t that no one had convictions about how to live; people always do.
Nor was it that no one had any philosophical thoughts about ethics. But the
dominant view was that ethics was “a subject without an object.”29 As a
philosophical topic, ethics was a dead end. There was no point discussing it,
other than to explain why the discussion could go nowhere.
I said above that Ayer was only part of the reason that ethics was
“despised.” Ayer or no Ayer, lots of people had internalized the billiard-ball
picture, and with it the idea of a dichotomy between facts and values. Even
some of Ayer’s signature ideas predated Language, Truth and Logic. Writing
in 1923, literary critic I.A. Richards and philosopher C.K. Ogden anticipated
Ayer at several points. Ogden and Richards contrasted statements like “the
height of the Eiffel Tower is 900 feet” with “more primitive,” “emotive”
uses of language which are not “theoretically verifiable”—exactly as Ayer
would a dozen years later.30 Over the following two decades, this became an

70
intellectual orthodoxy—in Oxford above all. Warnock summarized the
Zeitgeist of 1940s Oxford like this: people drew a hard distinction “between
reality, the facts of science, and subjective emoting . . . . Only the scientific
was to be respected as true.”31 Ayer’s book was a vivid expression of the
billiard-ball picture. But the picture would have gripped the imagination of
philosophers and their audiences regardless. And once you’re inside that
picture, moral philosophy is bound to seem like a waste of effort.
Over time, emotivism proved unworkable as a philosophical theory,
notwithstanding how attractive it had been to Ayer and other tough-minded
skeptics. A better theory was needed—even by those who merely wanted to
dismiss ethics once and for all. It was hard to imagine, though: who would
do this thankless work at a time when moral philosophy was passé?
Nevertheless, by 1950, in busy, busy Oxford, someone had done the job. A
new theory was available, one that would reign in Oxford and beyond for the
next decade. The new theory retained the billiard-ball picture but imbued it
with sobriety, even grandeur. It cleverly overcame the flaws of emotivism
while linking ethics to the Dawkins sublime.
Only a very particular kind of person could have come up with this theory.
Only someone brilliant, who could see his way through a host of technical
difficulties. Only someone with considerable self-possession and grit,
willing to work hard on “a despised subject.” Indeed, only someone deadly
earnest, someone who had learned through hard experience “the supreme
importance of oneself.”32 Only Hare.
♦♦♦♦
What was wrong with emotivism? Why was Hare’s new theory needed? In
its crudest form, in Language, Truth and Logic, emotivism made nonsense of
how people discuss moral questions. Emotivism claims to expose—to
unmask—what is really going on in moral discourse. But an “unmasking”
theory like emotivism must persuasively explain the concrete details of the
discourse it unmasks. If it can’t do this—if its explanations of these details
are forced or unilluminating—then it fails as a theory. So it was with
emotivism. Because if moral judgments are like “boo” or “hurrah,” it is hard
to understand what is going on when people argue about ethics, trying to
persuade one another. Indeed, is the comparison even plausible? Think of an
actual conversation where you were trying to bring someone around on a
question of how to behave. Was it remotely like one group of fans trying to

71
shout down another—drowning out boos with hurrahs? Didn’t you, rather,
bring up facts and principles that you saw as relevant to your case?
Stevenson saw the difficulty and responded, not by rejecting emotivism but
by refining it (and at the same time, coining the term). Stevenson argued that a
moral judgment is not just a manifestation of a subjective attitude, but also a
subtle form of manipulation. Perhaps moral judgments don’t truly mean
anything, but we can give a more compelling explanation of how they are
used. Their declarative, fact-like mode of expression pressures listeners to
conform to the speaker’s attitude (because we find it uncomfortable to
contradict others). To say that we should incarcerate fewer people, then, is
not simply to cheer for criminal-justice reform. It conveys something like, “I
approve of this; do so as well [emphasis mine].”33 Stevenson added that it
makes perfect sense for people to highlight what they like about, for example,
lowering the incarceration rate, the way someone might highlight what they
like about key-lime pie, in hopes of prodding someone to try it (“it’s the
contrast between the creamy tartness of the filling and the sweetness and
flake of the crust”). But this doesn’t mean there are facts about good and bad,
in either case. Stevenson saw no philosophically interesting difference
between judgments about desert and judgments about dessert.
Stevenson’s updated version of emotivism was an advance on Ayer’s. But
it faced equally grave difficulties. For one thing, it can only be a correct
analysis of the discourse of people who don’t understand it. Once people
grasp that the surface character of moral discourse is deceptive, and useful
only to manipulate, they can’t interact the way they did before their eyes
were opened. For one thing, they will arm themselves against moral talk.34 If
you know that the power of moral language lies in a misleading resemblance
to factual discourse, you won’t be taken in. Faced with someone who won’t
let you say you don’t like baked-fruit pies, but keeps insisting that baked fruit
is delicious (perhaps counting the ways), you’re likelier to laugh in their face
than fall into doubt. The plausibility of the emotivist analysis of moral
discussion depends on the truth being concealed from the people involved. A
person who knows they’re being manipulated won’t fall for it.35
There’s also another, more important problem with Stevenson’s version of
emotivism. The practice of moral reasoning is more intricate than people
simply expressing their likes or dislikes. We also try to work out the
implications of our commitments, and press one another on perceived
inconsistencies (“if you’re really pro-life, shouldn’t you oppose the death

72
penalty?”; “if you object to killing animals, shouldn’t you oppose late-term
abortions?”). There is nothing equivalent to this in the realm of dessert. If I
like apple pie but dislike peach cobbler, so what? Wouldn’t it be absurd,
someone urging me to be more consistent in my attitudes toward baked-fruit
desserts?
Hare’s new idea, which he began developing almost as soon as he took his
degree, was that moral language is universally prescriptive. Any sincere
moral judgment implies a command (a prescription), to anyone in similar
circumstances (universally) to act in accordance with that judgment. Like
Immanuel Kant, whom he studied closely when he returned to Oxford (with
MacKinnon, like the Somervillians before him), Hare concentrated not on
words like “good” or “bad” but on the word “ought.” So, to say that I ought
to look in on an elderly neighbor implies a command to anyone in
circumstances like mine, with a neighbor like this, to look in on them.
Not all prescriptions are universal. (I can perfectly well tell someone to
shut a gate and not imply anything more than that I want this person to shut
this gate, here and now.) But some are universal. And these prescriptions—
these “oughts”—have logical implications. If I say that professors ought to
evaluate student work anonymously, I can be criticized for inconsistency if I
don’t do so myself. And if I derived this “ought” from a more general
principle, about evaluating others’ qualifications without prejudice, I can be
pressed too to accept further implications of this principle: in hiring
practices, say. Hare saw this universal prescriptivity as the key to what he
would call, in the title of his first book, “the language of morals.”
Hare’s theory neatly solved the problems of earlier forms of emotivism.
Above all, it explained the possibility of moral reasoning: why we feel
rational pressure to adjust or clarify our ethical views in response to
criticism, as no one feels rational pressure to adjust or clarify their tastes.
(“Goodness, you’re right; I liked that strawberry-rhubarb pie. I retract what I
said earlier about the apple. It wouldn’t be consistent.”) On Hare’s theory,
moral discourse is not only meaningful; it has an internal logic. So moral
argument makes sense.
But Hare retained the picture of a value-free universe, which Foot found
entrapping. There are no ethical facts, Hare thought. There are just people
living out different sets of ethical commitments. The kind of reasoning that
people do, according to Hare, is reasoning about the implications of various

73
possible commitments. We make “decisions of principle,” as Hare called
them, and then try to live by them.36

RICHARD MERVYN (I)

Hare was a difficult man, short-tempered and impatient with disagreement.

His Balliol students made up a rhyme about him:
My pupils I have always taught
You cannot get from “is” to “ought.”
This is the burden of my song:
“It’s in my book, or else it’s wrong.”37

♦♦♦♦
Hare had suffered, and not only in the war. As already mentioned, he was an
orphan. His father died of a heart attack in 1929, when Hare was ten, as the
first months of the global recession began tearing at the family business.
Hare’s mother took it over and tried to preserve it, but it continued to
decline, and with it, their standard of living. The Hares moved from a large
country house to a small one, and then to a flat. Five years later, in 1934,
Hare’s mother died, leaving him in the care of two uncles, her brothers.
The stream of bad news must have reached young Hare mostly by letter.
From age eight, two years before his father’s death, he was at boarding
schools, initially at Copthorne in Sussex (which he later described as “a
cruel place”), then from 1932 at Rugby, where he had won a large
scholarship.38 A school report survives from a few months after his mother’s
death. Hare was distinguishing himself in most subjects, especially in his
studies of Demosthenes and Lucretius. His housemaster remarked that he
wished he “could be of more help” to the boy, describing the young Hare as
“very self-contained.”39 Doubtless he was. And then came the war.
How did these experiences form Hare? Already forced in late adolescence
to rely on himself, Hare was “pushed onto his back leg” (as a student of his
later remarked) by his wartime experiences. On the Burma-Thailand railway,
“[m]oral principles could not be argued about with one’s captors, only
affirmed in the face of them by an act of will.”40 It is a short step from there
to the doctrine of The Language of Morals, that each individual must “make

74
up his own mind which way he ought to live; for in the end everything rests
on such a decision of principle.”41
Interestingly, his experiences did not lead Hare to embrace the billiard-
ball picture—or not at first. In the book he wrote as a prisoner, An Essay in
Monism, he sought to rise above his sufferings by discerning a deeper, more
important reality behind or beneath what we experience. The book’s central
notion is “rhythm” or “harmony.” The particular “things” about which we talk
and think—people, their actions, objects in the world—are defined by
ordering principles which Hare calls “rhythms.” In the end, everything is
connected to everything else by a larger, encompassing rhythm within which
everything finds its place. The book concludes with some reflections on
worship, which draws together all the diverse ways that we achieve harmony
with ourselves and the world. “It is thus,” Hare writes, “that the partial
Rhythm of the Person finds its rest in the perfect Rhythm of the Whole.”
That closing sentence is representative of the elevated and elevating tone
of the book, quite unlike Hare’s published works. Under the influence of the
kind of professionalized, analytic philosophy he encountered on his return to
Oxford, Hare quickly came to regard his wartime efforts as “worthless.” He
turned to more respected topics and a more reserved tone. But as A.W. Price
notes, there are traces in the Essay of Hare’s later views, notably in the
connection he draws between the meaning of life and will: “if we are to find
order and unity in the world,” Hare writes in the Essay, “we must make our
own contribution to it.”42
Despite his brilliance and the awe with which many of his students
regarded him, Hare never fit comfortably into the scene Ryle was shaping.
He was not a collaborative thinker. Wounded and touchy, he inspired his
students with his absolute integrity and his admonitions to face up to one’s
responsibilities, make one’s own decisions of principle, and live them out.
This was Hare’s connection to the Dawkins sublime. Without trying to pass
off your responsibility on anyone else, you have to choose a set of principles
and live by them. It is the only way to be grown up.
But Hare was nearly as much an outsider to the Oxford mainstream as
Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, and Scrutton would become. People who knew
him well attest that he was rescued by his 1947 marriage to Catherine
Verney. Her brother Stephen, one of Hare’s earliest pupils, admired him
greatly, and arranged an introduction between Hare and his sister. Hare was,
Stephen told her, “one of the coming philosophers.”43 Catherine certainly

75
noticed his intelligence, but was equally impressed with how practically
skillful he was: growing vegetables, designing and making sandals (a pair of
which she was still wearing, years after his death). Did she, like Desdemona,
love Richard too “for the dangers [he] had passed”?44 They were swiftly
engaged, and Catherine spent the ensuing half-century soothing and softening
Richard in his frequently combative relations to his peers. She maintained a
bridge to the wider world. Richard later described his life from 1934, when
his mother died, until 1947 as “a night of mostly bad dreams between two
extremely happy days.”45

A WORLD OF WOMEN

In late summer 1948, Murdoch moved back to Oxford, rejoining her friends
and taking up the appointment she had won (over Scrutton) at St. Anne’s
College.* Foot, who had informed Murdoch about the opening, then offered
Murdoch lodgings with her and Michael at number 16 Park Town. Murdoch
stayed with the Foots for over a year before moving just around the corner
into a house, number 43, where she had lived briefly as an undergraduate.
Since 1945, Scrutton had been living in the attic of a building (number 55) a
short way uphill, in an adjoining crescent. Living frugally, but reveling in her
independence after too long at home or in institutional housing, Scrutton
livened up her room with “a huge Chinese flag . . . displaying a big purple
dragon with bulging black-and-white eyes on a sulphur-yellow
background.”46 And now finally, after years of Foot and Murdoch and
Scrutton seeing one another seldom and separately, “the sweeping view from
[Scrutton’s] attic window included them all.”47
Number 16 Park Town is the last in a curving terrace of graceful, mid-
Victorian houses facing a shared garden space. Clad with honey-colored
Bath limestone, and built in the same Greek-revival style as so much of that
famous resort town, the Park Town crescents stand in sharp contrast to the
Gothic and neo-Gothic architecture of most of Oxford’s colleges and some of
its grander residences. To help with their mortgage, the Foots routinely took
in lodgers. The ground floor was the Foots’ living space and where the three
Somervillians began to meet regularly—often joined by Anscombe, living
most of the time on her own and now a Somervillian too.

76
 Foot hosted her friends, even when she had little energy to participate in
their conversations. Newly appointed to her lectureship at Somerville, she
was cramming Greek so she could tutor Greats students and secure her long-
term future. But Foot never did anything at the expense of her students.
Averaging 12 hours of tutorials per week, not the 10 for which Somerville
had contracted her, overpreparing for every tutorial (she later advised a
junior colleague at Somerville, “never ask a student a question to which you
do not know the answer”),48 Foot’s work/life balance resembled
MacKinnon’s during the war. Michael had now finished his B.A. and was
working on a graduate thesis about Gladstone. When he got a chance, he
would regale visitors with his working hypotheses and with the latest things
he’d learned in the archives. Philippa would fall asleep in her chair as he
talked. She was on sick leave through most of Michaelmas term, 1948.49
The friends went on meeting, though: they met at the Foots’; they met in tea
shops; they went together to lectures and classes, including to Anscombe’s
debut lectures that fall, on “Some Ground Problems in the Theory of
Knowledge.” And they began, finally, to talk seriously about Ayer and
Stevenson and Hare. They had one year together, before Scrutton secured a
job at the University of Reading and left Oxford for good. Not knowing it
was the end, they laid hold of it as fiercely as if they did.
Murdoch’s journals from this year give a picture of what their life together
was like. They are littered with shorthand references to her friends: Mary or
M (though M could also be “Michael”), Pip or P, Elizabeth or E, often in
combination. After visiting Oxford to interview for the position at St. Anne’s,
she wrote, “A world of women. I reflected, talking with Mary, Pip &
Elizabeth, how much I love them.”50
What did they talk about? They talked about an idea that Hare too was
exploring. In 1950, Hare won the T.H. Green Moral Philosophy Prize, for a
thesis in two parts. The first part would become The Language of Morals.
The second part, which Ryle and the other judges dissuaded Hare from
pursuing, was that “thick” concepts—concepts that seem to involve both
description and evaluation, fact and value—might be a foundation for moral
judgment. In his thesis, Hare recalled, one of his examples was “friend.”51
In their tea shop and parlor conversations, the four friends were talking
about a similarly thick concept, inspired by Foot’s patrician upbringing:
rudeness. “Rude” is plainly a descriptive term, and one can gather evidence
to support a judgment that an action is rude. These judgments can be correct

77
or incorrect. But rudeness is also an inherently evaluative concept, a concept
one could not understand without recognizing that to call an action “rude” is
to judge it as bad behavior.
Like so much else that the four women were thinking about together that
year, the idea of thick concepts came to them from Wittgenstein, through
Anscombe. But it began to suggest a possibility to Foot—to all of them. If
judgments of rudeness could be objectively correct or incorrect, what other
judgments might be? What about judgments of cruelty or compassion? Justice
or injustice?
What about evil, like the scenes Foot had seen in the Pathé newsreels?
What about good?
♦♦♦♦
Hare could be terribly stubborn, but like nearly everyone, he was susceptible
to others’ judgments about intellectual respectability. Did he come to
perceive that there is no kosmos (as the Stoics called it)—no harmony or
“rhythm”—underlying the things of this world? Or was that simply a view
that no “coming philosopher” could defend in postwar Oxford without
provoking a smirk? Did he regretfully recognize some insuperable objection
to the idea that friendship could be one among many foundations for
objective moral judgments? Or was the near-universal acceptance of the
billiard-ball picture by his Oxford peers simply too difficult to resist?
There is a sad irony in the fact that Hare would become the bête noir of
Foot and her friends, the person whose views they targeted and worked to
overthrow. They were so alike, Foot and Hare especially: recoiling from the
inequalities they had known, traumatized by the horrors of the war and
inspired to think about ethics by those horrors, earnestly committed to doing
good in the world, disciplined to a fault.
But Hare was committed to a metaphysical picture on which the things the
Nazis did were not objectively wrong.52 And that was the thought that Foot
and her friends were determined to resist. The first thing they had to do,
though, before they could clarify their contrasting thoughts, was to get clear
on the picture they needed to smash. And that it was a picture. The best
person for the job was an aspiring novelist.

78
* Vaughan was wrong about the last point. Anscombe was an appreciative correspondent with many
friends and colleagues over her lifetime. But Vaughan’s letter shows the impression Anscombe
made in her first years at Somerville. And Vaughan wasn’t wrong about the probability of
Anscombe sending pictures of her children to the wives of prominent citizens in Philadelphia.
* Scrutton indulged her frustration by beheading a bed of irises, but she and Murdoch were quickly
reconciled. Murdoch for her part felt wretched about competing with her friend and told herself
(and Foot) that Scrutton was sure to get the position, though she applied all the same. See Iris
Murdoch to Philippa Foot, April 24, 1948, in Living on Paper, ed. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe
(London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), 107.

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 Chapter 5

Murdoch’s Diagnosis

“HARD & LUCID & INVIGORATING”

Wednesday, October 24, 1945. Iris Murdoch locked her hotel room on Rue
Neuve and set off at a brisk pace toward the eastern edge of the old town.
She had an appointment to keep, for a change.1
Murdoch had been biding her time in Brussels for about eight weeks,
resorting to sightseeing as she waited for someone to put her to work. Her
employer, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA), had an ambitious and inspiring mission—coordinating dozens of
far-flung aid organizations to address the needs of war victims. But precisely
because it involved fusions of cultures, national and institutional, the
UNRRA was in a perpetual state of disarray, reflecting the postwar disarray
of Europe itself. When Murdoch first left the Treasury in mid-1944 to work
for the UNRRA, she wrote to a friend, “I wander, amidst . . . what may one
day be an organisation, trying to persuade myself and others that I am doing a
job.”2 To another, she described her coworkers: a mixture of “inept British
civil servants (whom their departments could well spare; me for instance),
uncoordinated foreigners with Special Ideas and an imperfect command of
English and go-getting Americans and Canadians. The result is pretty fair
chaos.”3 Now finally on the continent after over a year of waiting and hoping
—wanting to do something concrete for the good of the world—Murdoch
found herself cooling her heels again. Almost as soon as she arrived, an
administrative reorganization left her with few responsibilities.
Brussels was the European capital least damaged by the war, and Murdoch
spent day after day wandering the streets. She took pleasure in
“masquerading as a British officer”4 at the servicemen’s clubs, but above all
in getting the richest experience of high culture she could. She was on the

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continent for the first time since her school days. Murdoch brought to
Brussels her whole Oxford and post-Oxford education plus the restive energy
of someone who hasn’t been anywhere new for years. She walked around in
reverie, taking in the eclectic mix of architecture—gothic, baroque, art
nouveau—and all the incidental textures of the city: “the French voices,
ridiculous little dogs, the little clanging trams, and the way everyone rides on
the running boards and never pays their fare . . . .”5 Best of all, she spent
hours in the Musée des Beaux Arts, gravitating again and again to Brueghel’s
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.*
Murdoch surely knew W.H. Auden’s famous pre-war meditation on
Brueghel’s painting—or, really, on human suffering and how easily we turn
from it. In both the poem and the painting, wingless Icarus drowns offshore
as everyone else—the plowman in the foreground, a fisherman by the shore
—sticks to his routine. She had been an appreciative reader of Auden’s
poetry since late adolescence; when he visited Badminton School, she was
picked to sit beside him. Both the poem and the painting (“one of the most
poetic of great pictures”)6 would have had special resonance for an earnest
young woman who had come to the continent to help:
. . . the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.7

♦♦♦♦
She spent hundreds of francs on a reproduction of the Breughel, which she
hung in her office, west of the canal.
Rivaling the joy of riding the trams or standing in front of the Brueghel
was the joy she felt at getting her hands on new books—especially works
belonging to the existentialist movement, just then becoming a craze in Paris
and beyond. Two weeks after her arrival in Brussels, she related to a friend
in London how, “[w]andering the city . . . I came on a highbrow bookshop . .
. where to my delight the assistant adored all my favourite authors & was
clearly expert on the genre of roman existentialist . . . . ”8 Her instantaneous
friend, Ernest Collet, let her borrow a recently published novel by Julien

81
Gracq, “about a young man who, not content with a superb mastery of life,
decides death must similarly be mastered & . . . commits suicide.”9
Murdoch’s letters from this time are filled with effusive discussion of
books that had not yet appeared in English, and had only just appeared in
England. She tore through Camus’s The Stranger, half a dozen of Sartre’s
books, and Simone de Beauvoir’s debut works of fiction and philosophy. De
Beauvoir particularly inspired Murdoch. Before leaving London, Murdoch
had already written and set aside two novels (the second, which she
submitted to Faber & Faber, was personally rejected by T.S. Eliot). But she
knew she would be writing more. After reading de Beauvoir’s She Came to
Stay, Murdoch judged her “everything that the modern novelist should be,”
adding: “and a woman, bless her!”10 She was certain that what these French
intellectuals were producing was “just what English philosophy needs to
have injected into its veins,”11 and spent every franc she could spare on
cheap postwar editions she would keep for the rest of her life. She also
bought a sturdy notebook with grey cloth covers in which to take notes on her
new acquisitions.
♦♦♦♦
Murdoch didn’t need her friend Collet to tell her that Sartre was coming to
town that October. His upcoming lecture at the city’s premier contemporary
art gallery was advertised in the papers. More to the point, it was
relentlessly discussed in the cafés Murdoch frequented in her (mostly) free
time. Chico Marx was in Brussels at the same moment and generated far less
excitement than the short, spectacled philosopher from Paris. Collet was
probably the one who wangled Murdoch an invitation to a private gathering
with Sartre after the talk.
But it was no good attending the after-party if she was crowded out of the
talk itself. Murdoch set out early. Gathering her notebook and (hoping for an
autograph) her copy of Being and Nothingness, she made her way down the
cobbled streets of the old city, past the medieval cathedral, past the neo-
classical city park, to hear a man she regarded as a prophet of late modernity.
The day was warm for October. Murdoch hurried down the Boulevard du
Regents and ducked into the Galerie Georges Giroux, exulting as always in
“the soft twitter of French” around her.12 Her beautiful notebook was
virtually new; she’d saved it for this. The only things she’d written yet were
her name and address and a quote from de Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus and Cineas.

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Before Sartre could speak, there was a long introduction by a professor from
Louvain. Finally, Sartre stood up. Squinting at the crowd, he apologized for
being underprepared, perhaps a joke at the expense of the man who had
introduced him. It wasn’t evident what he meant otherwise; he had a script.
For over an hour, as Sartre read to the hot, tightly packed gallery, he awed
Murdoch both with what he said and with his clarity and directness: “hard &
lucid & invigorating. It’s the real thing . . . .”13
She opened her notebook and began to write:
“. . . Each man is a ‘projet.’. . .
. . . Man is defined from without by his acts & habits . . . .
. . . We can’t not choose. We must create values . . . .”14

Sartre’s position—to which we will return—was that we are abandoned and

adrift in the universe, without horizon or charts. It is up to us to choose the
guiding principles of our lives. But we are condemned to this freedom; it is
our plight. With every deliberate act, we commit ourselves to the principles
implicit in that act. There is no opting out of choice. (“We can only choose
not to choose,” Murdoch scribbled.) To act with good faith—authenticity—
rather than bad faith is to make our choices in full recognition of their
inescapability and our abandonment. It is to embrace “Anguish.That is,
solitude in the face of a universal decision [emphasis Murdoch’s].” But this
was not all bad news, thought the 26-year-old Murdoch. It was also bracing,
an invitation to take responsibility for the world in the aftermath of war. “It is
a philosophy of vigour & action,” Murdoch noted: “Denuding.
Stimulating.”15
She would later criticize almost everything Sartre said that day. But she
would trace her determination to become a philosopher to the encounter.16
♦♦♦♦
In December, Murdoch was finally sent to the first of a series of placements
in Austria, where UNRRA aid was all that stood between the residents and
starvation. In these placements, she finally came face-to-face with the
desperation of the displaced persons she had gone to serve. With one married
couple, the Jančars, she inaugurated a life-long friendship. Unlike the ship’s
captain in Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus, she would not look away. She had
known grief and fear and had suffered vicariously with her friends during the

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war; she had written in generic terms in a string of wartime book reviews
about the need for any adequate postwar creed to address “the cities and . . .
the battlefields of the contemporary world.”17 But this was the first time she
confronted, close up, “how irrevocably broken so many lives have been by
this war. Nothing nothing nothing ahead for these people.”18 She thought any
philosophy worth teaching had to speak to this. By the summer of 1946,
UNRRA operations were beginning to wind down. Murdoch stayed until the
end of June.

“A RATHER BITTER EXPERIENCE OF LIFE”

Compared with Anscombe, Foot, or Scrutton, Murdoch was notable not only
for how early she found her philosophical voice and project, but also for
how little confidence she had in herself as a philosopher. This juxtaposition
takes us to the heart of who she was as an intellectual.
Elizabeth Anscombe, the subject of the next chapter, is an instructive
contrast. In the first 10 years after her return to Oxford in 1946, Anscombe
published only three pieces that were not translations of Wittgenstein: a
comment on a paper by C.S. Lewis in the journal of a student-run debating
society; an essay (dominated by Wittgenstein’s voice) in an obscure volume
by Cornell University Press; and a terse reply to a conference paper,
published with the original in the annual conference proceedings. In careerist
terms, she had done almost nothing. Only those close to her had any idea
what she thought.
But this was not owing to any doubt about her vocation. Anscombe did not
immediately know what she wanted to say, at least in print. But she was also
the most single-minded and self-possessed of any of her Oxford friends,
cranking out version after version of her thesis on “The Identity of Bodies.”
She was concerned only with satisfying herself—with getting things right.
Murdoch, by contrast, was a great experimenter and prone to recurring,
terrible doubts about “her reality as a thinker.”19 She was always willing to
put herself forward, to try things, whether poetry or acting or fiction or relief
work or playwriting or Russian or religion. As soon as her thoughts began to
take shape, she immediately wrote about them: in reviews, in letters, in radio
broadcasts, at academic conferences, in a short book. But Murdoch also
feared that she was a mere dilettante, or simply had little talent. And the

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philosophical agenda she began formulating during her stint with the UNRRA
was difficult for her contemporaries to place and appreciate.
At first, she had no clear agenda, other than to attend both to her
Anglophone peers and to the Parisians who excited her so much. She knew
that most Oxford philosophers would scorn Sartre and de Beauvoir, finding
their ambitions grandiose and their language undisciplined. And she was not
prepared to reject Oxford philosophy. Oxford was home; its people were her
people. MacKinnon had made her see the importance of engaging with the
objections of thinkers like Ayer. But she was determined to attend to
whatever spoke to her and her moment, and to figure out later how it could be
defended from charges of meaninglessness.
Soon, though, she began trying to bring these divergent figures and
traditions together in her mind. And she was the only one who could.
Murdoch was at once familiar with and distant from both the French and the
English thought-worlds. So she uniquely could see what the fact–value
dichotomy meant. She perceived the unexamined background picture that
gave this dichotomy so much power over the minds of her contemporaries on
both sides of the Channel and beyond. Murdoch’s agenda, from then on, was
to interpret and criticize her age, to diagnose it—particularly its images of
the human condition.
But her very familiarity with the philosophy and literature of the continent
made her a liminal figure in the anthropologist’s sense: a person who exists
between established categories. Murdoch was unclassifiable. She wasn’t
French. And she would never be an “Oxford philosopher” herself. She would
feel this more and more as time went on.
♦♦♦♦
The winter after Murdoch left the UNRRA was famously brutal—one of the
worst on record. For nearly two months, there was snowfall every day,
somewhere in the UK, with daily high temperatures often staying below
freezing. The snow piled up. It was a mirror of her soul.
Murdoch had been trying to find her way back into the academy, but
instead she was back living with her parents. Over the previous two years,
before and during her stint with the UNRRA, she had applied for lectureships
or studentships in philosophy at half a dozen different universities, including
the studentship Foot had secured at Somerville. Nothing had worked out. She
struck a casual “oh, well” tone, writing to another friend: “[Foot] has the . . .

85
post at Somerville which I was after too, but she deserves it anyway, as she
is much better at philosophy than I am . . . .”20 But the thought of Foot was
especially painful at that moment. It had been since the final year of the war.
Murdoch was feeling estranged from Foot, whom she loved like the sister
she’d never had. The rift between them was mainly in Murdoch’s head, but
even one-sided misunderstandings divide. The former flatmates scarcely
wrote during Murdoch’s term with the UNRRA. The cause was a love
quadrangle worthy of one of Murdoch’s novels. It left her especially lonely
and vulnerable in her first year back.
In the spring of 1944, Murdoch and Foot (then Bosanquet) exchanged
lovers. First, Murdoch stole—or was stolen by—Bosanquet’s boyfriend, the
attractive but ruthless Thomas Balogh (Bosanquet later described Balogh as
“an emotional fascist”).21 Murdoch had been seeing Michael Foot, feeling
more pity than attraction but enjoying his puppyish admiration. Balogh would
tolerate no rivals, though, and Murdoch obediently dropped Michael.
Bosanquet was initially jealous, but she had never been deeply in love
with Balogh. He was attractive, and amusing to be around, but nothing more.
She was taken aback by Murdoch’s audacity, but had no deep stake in the
outcome. She recovered rapidly. Then, one day in April, Michael stopped by
Seaforth, hoping to find Murdoch. Instead, he met Bosanquet, whom he had
seen before only at a distance. She later recalled how beautiful and forlorn
he seemed, “this enchanting and slightly shy-looking character at the door.”
They “never looked back.”22 Michael felt far more aggrieved toward
Murdoch than Bosanquet did; once or twice, out of consideration for his
feelings, Bosanquet banished her flatmate for an evening so that she and
Michael could be alone. When he left later that summer on the covert mission
that would see him captured and nearly killed, life at Seaforth mostly
returned to normal. But Murdoch continued to be harassed by her conscience,
feeling she had done something unpardonable. Explaining the situation to a
friend, Murdoch wrote, “I saw my relation to [Bosanquet] being gradually
destroyed, by my own fault, yet I did nothing to save it. She behaved
beautifully throughout.”23
Bosanquet probably behaved so beautifully because she was unaware that
her friend was in agonies of self-recrimination. It was months after Murdoch
returned from Austria before Murdoch tentatively, plaintively reached out to
her now-married friend, Philippa Foot: “When one has behaved as I then
behaved to two people one loves the hurt and the sense of guilt go very deep

86
. . . . My dear heart, I love you . . . . Be tolerant to this perhaps tiresome
letter.”24 We do not have Foot’s response to this naked cry, but it seems to
have been at once baffled and affectionate, insisting that there was “no
opposition between [her] love for Michael and for [Murdoch].” Murdoch’s
reply was as heart-on-sleeve as her initial plea: “Dear, there have been times
when I felt lacerated and broken beyond repair. But . . . the fact that this
precious, central thing in my life, my friendship with you, does remain, gives
me such courage . . . .”25 Murdoch began writing to Foot regularly, Foot
responding when her health and heavy workload permitted.
Nonetheless, it would be years before Murdoch felt like there was no
unwanted distance between her and Foot—certainly not until Foot helped
bring her back to Oxford in 1948 and the Foots invited her to lodge with
them, and not fully until after Michael walked out on Philippa in 1959. Even
as her friend’s letters helped to sustain Murdoch through the winter of 1947,
the lingering sense that she had done irreversible damage, that things would
never be the same, made that terrible winter much worse. Foot had moved on
and married someone who might never forgive Murdoch—or so it seemed to
her. And Foot was doing the thing Murdoch most wanted to do: think and talk
and write about philosophy. Murdoch, by contrast, was in stasis.
♦♦♦♦
When she resigned from the UNRRA, Murdoch had had a plan for 1946–47.
As the impending dissolution of the UNRRA had come into view, she had
applied for the Smithson studentship at Cambridge (the one Anscombe had
held in the early 1940s), and also for a studentship at Vassar College, two
hours’ drive up the Hudson Valley from New York City. Vassar said yes.
What did she want to do? As she wrote in her application for the
Smithson, she wanted to think about ethics. Through her encounters with
Kierkegaard, Sartre, and others outside the Anglophone sphere, she began to
think for the first time “that ethics could be seriously and profoundly treated
from an academic point of view”—that it could deal with “the real moral
problems that were distressing [her] and [her] contemporaries.”
It was a matter of breaking out of the strictures imposed by Ayer and other
logical positivists and finding a vocabulary in which to talk seriously about
human nature and the human condition. What instruction about life could one
expect from people who were skeptical of any talk that went beyond
definitions, rules of logic, and observation reports? Murdoch wanted to find

87
a philosophy with something to say about “man here and now . . . with
definite social and emotional problems to face—the man who goes to the
cinema, makes love, and fights for or against Hitler.” She allowed that this
agenda would probably “have to be narrowed down.”26
In June, Murdoch learned that she had won the Durant Drake award at
Vassar, and withdrew her candidacy for the Smithson. She began dreaming of
another year of intense enrichment in a new environment, near another great
city. It never came to pass.
Applying for a visa to the United States, Murdoch scrupulously
acknowledged her former membership in the Communist Party. And that was
that: her application was denied. She was not short of advocates.
MacKinnon, Somerville Principal Janet Vaughan, the Vice-Chancellor of the
University, even celebrities like Bertrand Russell lobbied on her behalf, to
no avail. By the time the hopelessness of the situation became evident, the
Smithson studentship had been awarded to someone else. Murdoch would
spend the year at home in suburban Chiswick.27 For the diversely talented,
perpetually experimenting, and chronically self-doubting Murdoch, that
winter—having no clear task—was among the most miserable seasons of her
life.
♦♦♦♦
It wasn’t only Foot from whom Murdoch felt distant at this moment. It was
MacKinnon, too. In the earlier loneliness of mid-1943, before Bosanquet
joined her at Seaforth, Murdoch had become increasingly dependent on
MacKinnon, traveling to Oxford at every opportunity to see him. She spent
hours in his office, weeping over her spiritual uncertainties, her misdeeds,
her loneliness, making him her confidant and confessor. Both Murdoch and
MacKinnon described their interactions to others as a melodrama with
Murdoch playing Mary Magdalene to MacKinnon’s Jesus. Intensely
conscientious, MacKinnon felt increasingly responsible for Murdoch and
was drawn into an intellectual and emotional intimacy beside which his
marriage looked remote. When Lois MacKinnon finally intervened in
September 1943, her husband cut off both Murdoch’s visits and their
correspondence. Murdoch continued to speak adoringly of him in letters,
though, writing things like “I think I’ll always be a bit in love with
Donald.”28 She got some news of him from Bosanquet, with whom
MacKinnon remained close.

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 MacKinnon never ceased looking after Murdoch, during or after the war.
He may have been responsible for the commissions she received in 1943 and
1944 to write book reviews for The Adelphi—one of which appeared a year
after their break. All of the books Murdoch reviewed address the place of
Christianity in the modern world—one of MacKinnon’s leading
preoccupations. And MacKinnon wrote on Murdoch’s behalf both to
Cambridge and Vassar—and then to the US Embassy.
When Murdoch returned to England from Austria in July 1946, MacKinnon
initially declined her request to visit. By August, though, he had relented.
MacKinnon agreed to give her informal guidance as she read Kant, Hegel,
and Kierkegaard at home. This gave her some sense of forward motion in a
time when she otherwise had none. Murdoch was delighted to discover that
since they had last spoken, MacKinnon too had begun reading the French
existentialists. He shared Murdoch’s sense that they were speaking to the
needs of the age. MacKinnon was surely pleased by Murdoch’s increasing
openness to Christianity.
Perhaps the outcome would not have been so grievous if they had resumed
contact a year or two later, when Murdoch was less desolate. Or if Murdoch
and Lois MacKinnon had been friends (Lois was only three years older).
Donald tried to supply Murdoch with third-party support, so that they would
not fall back into their old roles as Christ and penitent Magdalene. He
directed her to an Anglo-Catholic abbey in Kent that welcomed retreatants.29
(A priest he consulted recommended the Abbess as “good with difficult
cases.”)30 But Murdoch’s devotion and neediness were more intense than
ever.
Their relationship came to a second crisis during Holy Week 1947. They
met in London for a conversation that lasted all afternoon and into the
evening. Afterward, either distrusting Murdoch or distrusting himself,
MacKinnon again cut off contact. As before, he did what he could at a
distance, occasionally sending Murdoch a book that he thought she would
find instructive. He wrote her a glowing testimonial when she reapplied
(successfully) for the Smithson studentship at Cambridge, adding that “She
has had a rather bitter experience of life in the last few years, but has learnt
from it a great deal that has made her disciplined and self critical.”31 He
wrote to Foot of his determination to show “a true care for I[ris].”*, 32
That same spring, MacKinnon received an offer to take up a distinguished
professorship at the University of Aberdeen, which he eagerly accepted.

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With MacKinnon leaving England and little prospect of repairing the breach,
Murdoch wrote to Foot,
I feel such misery at present, about D . . . . He matters to me so absolutely—Cambridge & my
own ‘future’ are just nothing in comparison. But there’s nothing to be done, except remember him
& carry on. I’m sick at heart & can’t work. Life’s been disintegrated in a nightmarish way for so
long now, one almost forgets what it would be like to feel normal & secure & loved.33

Murdoch and MacKinnon would see one another just once more, 15 years
later, meeting by chance on a street in Cambridge. His name recurred in her
journals to the end of her life.
♦♦♦♦
Murdoch had the sense to plan a two-week holiday in France with Scrutton
before going up to Cambridge in the fall of 1947: anything to take her mind
off her misery. But it was nevertheless with this sense of disintegration—
coming to terms with the loss of someone who had been her intellectual and
spiritual mentor—that Murdoch began her graduate studies. Consciously or
not, she was looking for new influences and new masters. She found them—
in particular, in the person of her old undergraduate friend Elizabeth
Anscombe.
Murdoch was also on the cusp of discovering one of the leading themes of
her philosophical career. In August, just before going up, she wrote to Foot,
“Did you hear Copleston . . . the other day on the [BBC’s] 3rd prog[ram]? . .
. .one word he used gave me a clue—‘heroic.’ . . . Close subterranean
relation between . . . Sartre & the romantic movement.”34 Like the
Romantics, Sartre glamorized feelings of alienation from the inauthentic herd.
Could Sartre be an unwitting Romantic? Could one interpret his teaching as a
Romantic re-presentation of something like . . . Ayer’s picture?

“A WITTGENSTEINIAN NEO-PLATONIST”

MacKinnon was not wrong to testify to the selection committee at Cambridge

that Murdoch had “matured considerably” and was “on the threshold of
creative work of a high order.”35 Murdoch’s 1947 research proposal was far
more grounded and assured than the one she had submitted the year before
from Austria. Her second proposal was twice as long as the first and studded

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with references to her previous year’s reading under MacKinnon. It also
greatly clarified her outlook and task:
although I have a great admiration for its methods . . . I cannot regard logical positivism as the
whole of philosophy. A consideration of ethical problems first convinced me of this . . . . One
cannot abolish a sphere of human thought by branding it as “imaginative literature.” The unrest and
the debate about the nature of human goodness and of “human reality” will continue whether or
not it is permitted to call itself philosophy. The linguistic philosopher should be prepared to take this
challenge seriously. But to do this would mean revising his conceptions of meaning . . . . It might
also point the way to some sort of real contact and exchange of ideas and methods between the
two seemingly irreconcilable schools of philosophy.36

It wasn’t clear to her yet how to challenge the positivist account of meaning.
But it was widely known that this was a central preoccupation of
Anscombe’s mentor, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein had just retired, so
there was no question of Murdoch attending his lectures or classes anymore.
That may have been for the best. For someone so given to unchecked
devotion, with the wound of MacKinnon’s rejection still open, this could
have been dangerous. There was danger enough from Anscombe herself.
Almost as soon as she arrived in Cambridge, Murdoch approached
Anscombe, angling for an introduction to Wittgenstein. Either Anscombe or
Wittgenstein himself was initially resistant, devastating Murdoch. In late
October, though, shortly before Wittgenstein left Cambridge to take up an
itinerant life in Ireland, upstate New York, and elsewhere, Anscombe came
through. Murdoch was ushered in for a brief interview with the reclusive
genius. As Murdoch recalled later, “both he and his setting were very
unnerving.”37 Wittgenstein’s rooms were nearly empty: two chairs and a bed,
no more. There were no pleasantries, either. Wittgenstein began the
conversation by asking why Murdoch wanted to see him. Her journal entry on
the encounter recalls Jesus’ exchange with the Canaanite woman in Matthew
chapter 15. Wittgenstein said, “It’s as if I have an apple tree in my garden &
everyone is carting away the apples & sending them all over the world. And
you ask: may I have an apple from your tree.” Murdoch replied, “Yes; but I’m
never sure when I’m given an apple whether it really is from your tree.”
Wittgenstein seemed to like this, but morosely added, “What’s the use of
having one philosophical discussion? It’s like having one piano lesson.”38
Reflecting back on the incident a dozen years later, she said, “with most
people, you meet them in a framework, and there are certain conventions
about how you talk to them . . . . There isn’t a naked confrontation of

91
personalities. . . . perhaps that’s why I always thought of him . . . with awe
and alarm.”39
Murdoch got further with Anscombe herself. Anscombe took Murdoch into
the small community of Wittgenstein disciples in Cambridge and shared with
her Wittgenstein’s unpublished lecture notes. She shared, too, her draft
translations from Wittgenstein’s late masterpiece, Philosophical
Investigations.
♦♦♦♦
Wittgenstein’s influence on Murdoch isn’t always appreciated; she wrote
much more about Kant and Kierkegaard, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Plato and
Simone Weil. But she described herself to an interviewer once as a
“Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist.” What were the principal lessons she took
from her (mediated) encounter with perhaps the most influential philosopher
of the twentieth century?
Like Richard Hare, Wittgenstein had worked out his earliest philosophical
thoughts while trapped by war: in Wittgenstein’s case, the Great War, in
which he served with an Austrian artillery unit on the Russian front. There
are interesting similarities between Wittgenstein’s first book, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, and Hare’s unpublished An Essay in Monism. Each
sought an elevated vantage point on the horrors around them; each found this
vantage point in the thought that the world has a hidden structure—
crystalline, beautiful—beneath the blood and the stench. For the young
Wittgenstein, the structure was one that made it possible for language to
describe the world. At a deep level, he thought, the world and our words
must be isomorphic. Our sentences and thoughts are pictures— schematic
diagrams—of how objects are arranged in the world. (Wittgenstein began his
career as an engineer and architect.) There was a more challenging
implication, too: Wittgenstein famously took the view that the meaning of life
is inexpressible, because this meaning is not a mere arrangement of objects:
it can’t be pictured.
Like Hare, Wittgenstein came to repudiate his early work.
Starting in the 1930s and continuing until his death in 1951, Wittgenstein
worked out a sharply contrasting view, often exploring and defending it
through an imagined dialogue with his earlier self (“the author of the
Tractatus”). On Wittgenstein’s later view, meaningful language refuses to
conform itself to any single pattern. Two of Wittgenstein’s students relate an

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incident that was clearly pivotal in Wittgenstein’s own narrative of his
changing views. A friend of Wittgenstein’s made an obscene gesture and
asked Wittgenstein, “what’s the logical form of that?”40 This broke the grip
of Wittgenstein’s earlier conception on his imagination. The older
Wittgenstein compared language not to a blueprint but to a row of controls in
a locomotive. At first glance, you might think: they’re all the same, they’re all
knobs; you grab them.* But when you begin to use them, you find that they do
very different things.41 And so it is with words, which might seem
superficially alike (they’re all for speaking or writing) but serve a hundred
purposes besides naming objects and picturing their relationships: joking,
counting, crying out, calling someone’s name. The author of the Tractatus,
Wittgenstein came to think, was held captive by a too-tidy picture. The
picture of picturing.
Anscombe was deeply invested in Wittgenstein’s entire project. But here
is what Murdoch, Foot, and Scrutton took away from their late-1940s
conversations with her: language use is a complex, many-sided form of
behavior—a “form of life,” Wittgenstein called it—and any simple set of
rules (like Ayer’s) purporting to lay out the necessary conditions for language
to have meaning is just wrong.42 There can be no such rules. And this thought
suggested another. As Scrutton later wrote, “language has to be rooted in the
complexities of real life . . . . [B]ecause speech is a central human activity,
reflecting our whole nature—because language is rooted . . . in the wider
structure of our lives . . . it leads on to an investigation of our whole
nature.”43 In real life, description and evaluation are not neatly separable.
This was especially evident with words like “rude” or “friend,” but it was
more subtly true even of the words Ayer and Hare preferred to analyze, like
“good” or “ought.” The inseparability of description and evaluation in
ordinary human discourse would be a major theme in a seminar Murdoch and
Foot taught together in the early 1950s—“Analysis in Moral Philosophy”—
though it would be Foot who went on to develop the idea most thoroughly.44
The thought began with Anscombe teaching all of her friends what she had
learned and found so liberating.
♦♦♦♦
Anscombe had another effect on Murdoch, too. She became a new object of
devotion. All through her early adulthood, Murdoch sought out master figures

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like MacKinnon, with whom her relationships were simultaneously
intellectual and erotic.45 Once she began interacting more extensively with
Anscombe, Murdoch soon became infatuated with her. It was perhaps the
first time she was infatuated with a woman—though by no means the last.
Like Wittgenstein—like MacKinnon before him—Anscombe represented a
standard of intellectual and spiritual seriousness before which Murdoch felt
herself hopelessly inadequate. As she confided to her journal already in the
summer of 1947, “The ruthless authenticity of Elizabeth makes me feel more
and more ashamed of the vague self indulgent way in which I have been
philosophizing.” In the same entry, she quotes her friend: “No second rate
philosophy is any good.”46 In this state of awed self-abnegation, Murdoch
spent much of the next two years tailing after Anscombe, devotedly attending
her lectures and seeking out every opportunity for informal interaction. Many
pages of her Cambridge-year journal are devoted to reflection on topics
Anscombe was thinking through, like our relationship to the past. (One sign
of a crush is that you can’t stop talking about him or her.) A friend told her
later that he had noticed her, “every week, waiting for E. outside schools,
before he knew me, & how . . . I would flush for pleasure when she came
out.” “He’s hellish observant,” she conceded.47
Murdoch’s half-conscious “courtship” of her friend came to a decisive
turn sometime in late November or early December of 1948. Judging from
Murdoch’s journals that fall, Anscombe had come to regard Murdoch as an
important friend too, going out with her evenings and stopping by her
lodgings. Then some line was crossed, though we have only Murdoch’s side
of the story. Even there, seven pages are missing from her journal, between
entries for November 23 and December 11. Shortly after the missing entries,
Murdoch remarks, “I need a strong box to keep this damn diary in. Probably I
ought to destroy all the entries of the last 3 weeks.”48 Seemingly, she did.
What are preserved afterward are ten pages of tortured longing and self-
criticism:

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 Intense desire to know what’s really going on in E’s mind.
Tried to pray, last night & this morning. All darkened with emotion.
Overwhelmed with a . . . wish that she may be well, that she may not be harmed by this. Yet
this feeling is so utterly mixed with self regarding wishes. . . . There must be utter steel in my love,
a willingness not to ask or get anything for myself. . . . Easy to write this—intensely hard to take
even the next small step towards it.
I have always managed to work through my worst crises with someone—Pippa, D. Have yet to
learn loneliness. . . . Must root out the weak desire for an audience.49

Murdoch recorded a decade later that “E and I never touched each other,
except for my touching her arm . . . .”50 Whatever happened, it alarmed
Anscombe enough that on December 10 she fled to Ireland to see
Wittgenstein. To Murdoch’s chagrin, their mutual friend Yorick Smythies said
to her that he regarded Anscombe’s “getting away as she did” as “the result
of prayer.” Murdoch, for her part, tried to pray, as MacKinnon had prayed
over her, “that I may really desire her well-being.”51
Again, we have only Murdoch’s side of the story. But Anscombe refers
obliquely to the incident at the start of a notebook of reminiscences about
Wittgenstein. She writes,
I visited [Wittgenstein] in Dublin in 1948 in need of . . . help and advice because of a matter that
was troubling me. . . . I had certainly got into a queer state of mind, partly assisted by having
employed a hypnotist to help me to give up smoking; this had been partly successful . . . but [I]
was beset by a troublesome obsession and by insomnia.

More than one thing was eating at Anscombe; besides trying to quit smoking,
she was also working feverishly on a late draft of her first original
philosophical publication. Anscombe related to Wittgenstein some of the
thoughts she’d had as she tried to hypnotize herself, “lying in [her] bed in
Somerville,” thoughts of being suspended above a deep well by an elastic
cord, and of reaching up to cut the cord. Wittgenstein told her firmly, “don’t
do it again.” Indeed, he told her to resume smoking.
This worked wonders. Some cigarettes, a few nights’ sleep in the hotel
where Wittgenstein had booked her a room, a series of outings together to the
Botanical Gardens, to the cinema, and to the Dublin Zoo, and “the troubling
images that were disturbing [her]” began to subside.52 She recalled the
episode later chiefly as an example of the generosity of spirit hidden beneath
Wittgenstein’s intimidating demeanor. It is ambiguous, in the end, what
Anscombe experienced: a conflicted attraction? bewilderment at her friend
coming on to her? Whatever it was, it was compounded by acute nicotine

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withdrawal and professional anxiety. The only clear thing is that the incident
was never repeated.
♦♦♦♦
When Anscombe returned to Oxford after Christmas, she and Murdoch
gingerly worked on reestablishing normal relations. Murdoch was relieved.
On February 3, she recorded, Anscombe visited her but seemed nervous.
They talked philosophy for a while, relaxing into their old pattern. A few
weeks on, Anscombe shared with Murdoch “a very disagreeable letter
written by some woman who objected to her wearing trousers at early
mass.”53 (Later, Anscombe reported back that an elderly and severe-seeming
priest she had sought out for counsel had assured her that “there was no
objection to her clothes!”)54 Murdoch and Anscombe would go on meeting
occasionally over coffee, and Murdoch sent copies of her first five novels to
Anscombe. But the friendship was never again what it had been in late 1948.
Late in life, Anscombe mused, “I don’t think we ever quite managed to work
out what we meant to each other.”55
♦♦♦♦
Murdoch’s “bitter experiences” of the 1940s grounded a career’s worth of
psychologically acute novels, the first of which, Under the Net, appeared in
1954. It seemed to Murdoch’s friends to contain half-portraits of many
people in her life, including Anscombe. Under the Net, like many of her later
novels, centers on an alluring mage-figure who exerts conscious or
unconscious power over others and on the conflicted interior lives of
characters trying to free themselves from the mage’s influence. Murdoch had
been both subject and object of obsessive devotion and knew its dynamics
well—how it exalts and grips and occludes.
The tribulations of her twenties were enough to convince Murdoch that
Sartre’s inspiring picture of human beings was flawed. We are not as solitary
and self-possessed as his early writings suggested. Rather, we are (as she
would put it later) “egocentric system[s] of quasi-mechanical energy, largely
determined by [our] own individual history[ies], whose natural attachments
are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control.”
Philosophical ethics, she thought, must theorize the “fat relentless ego” and
determine what techniques might enable us to overcome it.56 It would take

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her another decade to work out a vision for this, drawing inspiration from
Plato. But already she knew that the way out of a controlling obsession is not
to courageously assert your freedom. Changing your life is more like steering
a ship or building a habit than like taking a single, fateful step. It is hard, but
in a different way.

THE DIAGNOSIS

By 1950, Murdoch was sure of two things: first, there was a subcutaneous
likeness between contemporary British thinking about ethics and the
existentialist ideas crossing the Channel from France; second, with respect to
the ideas that bound them together, the British and the French were both
wrong. Because she was immersed in both British and French thought,
Murdoch saw before anyone else did the massive and telling convergence,
the yet-unnamed Zeitgeist. And perhaps because all her philosophical
mentors had been contrarians, she was primed to resist.
Murdoch had been back in Oxford less than a year, was barely settled at
the Foots’ and at St. Anne’s, when she began receiving high-profile
invitations to explain existentialism to a curious public. It is unsurprising that
once Murdoch had the prestige of an Oxford post, she would begin to draw
attention. She was as dramatic a figure in Oxford in 1949 as she had been a
decade before. Open-tempered and personally attractive, Murdoch gave off
an aura of both bohemianism and spiritual rigor that always intrigued, even
when it didn’t impress.
As a tutor, she channeled MacKinnon. She was selfless with her time,
letting tutorials run long and meeting up with students outside of lessons for
worship or drinks. She also emulated MacKinnon’s devoted attention to his
students’ personal needs. She took one forlorn international student home
with her for Christmas. She even emulated MacKinnon’s eccentricities,
listening to student essays from a prone position or curled in a ball, twirling
her hair. She would assign students to read and discuss whatever came to her
mind during their conversations together: Lenin, Kierkegaard, Weil. First-
year students, anxious to cover the syllabus, were sometimes frustrated.
More advanced—or needier—students became devotees. She attended a
huge number of weddings, often giving lavish gifts.
And it took little time for her to develop a reputation among her peers as a
leading expert on contemporary French thought. In 1949, she was

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commissioned by the Foots’ friend and new lodger, BBC producer Prue
Smith, to give a pair of talks about existentialism on the BBC’s still-young
highbrow channel, the Third Programme. The first of these, “The Novelist as
Metaphysician,” was about the philosophical significance of Sartre’s,
Camus’, and de Beauvoir’s fiction. But it ranged well beyond that. Murdoch
spent much of the talk linking the doctrines of Sartre and his friends with
those of Ayer and Stevenson that she and her friends were routinely
discussing at tea shops in Cornmarket Street.
Recall Sartre’s view: we are condemned to be free, forced to invent
values in a world where none can be found. This sounds grim, but it is also
an invitation to heroism—to face the hard truth that others will not. In taking
up this challenge, we ennoble ourselves or at least dispense with illusions.
We also create ourselves; our identities are the sum of our choices. Making
no excuses, but living authentically—in the root sense, as authors of
ourselves—we acknowledge that we are whatever we summon the will to
do.
In her talk, Murdoch quotes a paradigmatic statement of this outlook:
There is nothing to be done . . . except look at the facts, look at them harder . . . and then come to
a moral decision. Then asking whether the attitude that one has adopted is the right attitude comes
down to asking whether one is prepared to stand by it. There can be no guarantee of its
correctness, because nothing counts as a guarantee. Or . . . something may count for someone as
a guarantee, but counting something as a guarantee is itself taking up a moral standpoint.57

Murdoch adds: “This is not Sartre but Professor A.J. Ayer writing in a recent
number of Horizon.” But with small adjustments in vocabulary, it could
easily have been Sartre. All the elements are there: criterionless choice, the
inescapability of decisions of principle despite the impossibility of getting
them “right,” the sober challenge to live out these anguished decisions.
We have here both elements of the modern outlook sketched in the opening
chapter: the billiard-ball universe, the Dawkins sublime. Values are human
projections onto a value-free reality. They cannot be right or wrong. In her
radio address, Murdoch speaks of “the free and lonely self” in a world
without “objective values.” She begins by summarizing Sartre’s thought, but
notes that “by dissimilar paths the existentialists and [Ayer] have reached
positions which are . . . strikingly alike.”58
She notes, too, the implicit or explicit admonitions to courage or strength
or adult responsibility that often accompany such positions. These

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admonitions, she remarks, are undercut by the positions themselves: “We are
told that we are lonely individuals in a valueless and meaningless world. Yet
it is also hinted that . . . certain moves are preferable to certain others.”59
Consistent or not, these are the aspects of the picture that inspire.
Around the time of her BBC debut, Murdoch signed a contract to write the
first study in English of Sartre’s thought. She titled it Sartre: Romantic
Rationalist, sounding a theme to which she would return repeatedly. Calling
Sartre’s views “Romantic,” she highlights his subtle and likely unconscious
invocation of two Romantic tropes: the sublime and the Romantic hero. The
two go together. The existentialist hero, she notes, rises above his sense of
the absurdity of life by confronting it courageously. Like the figure in Caspar
David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, he stares down the abyss,
finding sublimity both in the unfathomable drop and in the spectacle of
himself standing above it. Because the absurdity of life, not the obscurity of
the land below, is the source of the sublime, the existentialist hero isn’t a
mountain climber but one of the alienated rebels who have been part of the
Western canon since the Romantic era: Goethe’s Werther, Byron’s Manfred,
Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester. Murdoch notes that the invitation to
identify with this type involves more than a little self-aggrandizement: “It is
patent that what many readers of Sartre find in his writings is a portrait of
themselves. A likeness is always pleasing, even if one is not handsome; and
to be told that one’s personal despair is a universal human characteristic may
be consoling.”60 As Murdoch would write later, the gloom characteristic of
existentialist writing “is superficial and conceals elation”: “the reader feels
himself to be a member of the élite, addressed by another . . . .”61
The point was more tartly expressed in the title of a French-language
broadcast to which she contributed a few months after her BBC debut:
“L’Angoisse, snobisme moderne,” “Anguish: modern snobbery.”62
♦♦♦♦
Pictures matter. This is one of Murdoch’s enduring insights. Pictures matter,
and some pictures are better than others. At a time when her contemporaries
didn’t think they were inside a picture at all, Murdoch borrowed the idea of
an imprisoning picture from Wittgenstein and wrote, “Man is a creature who
makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”63
Murdoch came to find the “existentialist” picture of human nature and the

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human condition comically distorted. She had immersed herself in Christian
devotional practices and tried with painful difficulty to overcome a string of
obsessional attachments. She knew what moral and spiritual striving was
like. And tough-sounding admonitions to pull yourself together and choose
were false to her experience of change and growth. Indeed, they made
nonsense of the goal-oriented idea of growth—of the upward or outward
yearning that is inseparable from the moral life. At around the same time as
she was diagnosing both Sartre and her fellow British philosophers, she was
devouring the writings of twentieth-century French mystic Simone Weil. Her
third broadcast for the Third Programme, in 1951, was a discussion of Weil’s
Waiting for God. She gravitated especially to Weil’s idea that the human task
is to decenter ourselves and give full and un-self-interested attention to the
reality of others—to really look at them without trying to possess or control,
the way one looks at a work of art when thoroughly absorbed by it. This un-
selfing is what she had prayed the strength to do with regard to her friend
Elizabeth Anscombe.

“AUSTIN”

Murdoch left Oxford in 1963, after 15 years on the faculty of St. Anne’s. She
had more than one reason. The work of an Oxford tutorial fellow is
demanding; by the early 1960s, Foot, too, was eyeing the possibility of
escape to an American university. And Murdoch wasn’t just teaching.
Following the publication of Under the Net in 1954, she had written almost a
novel a year.64 But she had written them all during the summers, over the long
vacation. She judged, plausibly, that if she was going to progress as a writer,
she had to commit more exclusively to the work.
She wasn’t in the same place professionally as she had been 15 years
earlier. Neither was she in the same place personally. In 1956, she had
married literary critic John Bayley—a man she loved deeply but in a quieter,
less worshipful way than she had loved MacKinnon or Anscombe or the
dominating, destructive Nobel laureate Elias Canetti.* “Puss,” she called
Bayley in her journals, the way she called her father “Doodle.” Bayley, and
their overgrown property outside Oxford, Cedar Lodge, had become sources
of serenity.
Now, in 1963, that quiet, separated world was under threat. Murdoch had
become embroiled in an affair with a St. Anne’s colleague, Margaret

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Hubbard, a situation that threatened to become a scandal.65 But Murdoch had
grown. She now had the fortitude to walk away from such an obsession,
where before she had not. For the good of the College and to preserve her
seven-year-old marriage to Bayley, she cut ties both with Hubbard and with
St. Anne’s. From 1963, she and Bayley were in but not of Oxford, and
Murdoch in particular had less and less to do with the University.
She had a further reason to quit the University, though. Murdoch had
concluded that in a deeper sense she didn’t belong. She had concluded that
she wasn’t really a philosopher. She had diagnosed her contemporaries,
describing the picture they unconsciously inhabited; she had broken the
illusion of inevitability by naming what held them captive. But offering this
diagnosis served to marginalize her further.
Gilbert Ryle had achieved his postwar aims. Under Ryle’s leadership, the
rigorous but narrow conception of philosophy as linguistic analysis had come
to dominate in Oxford and beyond. The new ideal was this: philosophers
could illumine and refine our thinking by attending to the nuances of ordinary
language, the intricate but underappreciated apparatus shared by intellectuals
and plain persons alike.
Ryle did more than anyone to promote the new Oxford approach, which
came to be known as “ordinary-language philosophy.” But J.L. Austin was its
leading theorist and practitioner. Austin’s methods had roots both in the
patient textual scholarship he practiced as a Greats tutor and in his wartime
experiences sifting military intelligence. Working collaboratively with his
(male) junior colleagues at Oxford, whom he convened informally each
Saturday morning during term-time, Austin tried to get as clear as possible
about subtle differences among clusters of topically related words:
“hounding down the minutiae,” as he put it.66 Austin was determined to make
progress in philosophy. And surveying the wreckage of philosophical history
—all the grand systems constructed, then abandoned—he renounced system-
building. Or at any rate, he determined that the only way to build something
worthwhile was extremely slowly, piece by piece, scrutinizing our words
and, through them, our concepts. Under Austin’s influence, a whole
generation of Oxford philosophers came to share his impatience with
generalization and synthesis, his intellectual aesthetic of clarity and
cleanliness. “Words are our tools,” Austin wrote, “and . . . we should use
clean tools.”67

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 It is not difficult to see the attractions of Austin’s approach: the painstaking
carefulness, the submission to the ideal of getting something right, even if it is
nothing grand. But in a context obsessed with that ideal, Murdoch’s eclectic,
allusive essays, concerned with big, competing visions of the world and the
human condition, were bound to appear merely sloppy. Murdoch inspired
those close to her and some outsiders with her range and insight, but her
philosophical writing was less and less appreciated in Oxford as the 1950s
wore on. Colleagues regarded her as a helpful expert on a minor—and not
especially highly regarded—subject, contemporary French thought. Hare’s
remark on French existentialism is telling: “the thing wrong with the
Existentialists and the other Continental philosophers is that they haven’t had
their noses rubbed in the necessity of saying exactly what they mean.”68
In the milieu Ryle and Austin had created, Murdoch’s work didn’t register
as properly disciplined, properly philosophical. Isaiah Berlin, who adulated
Austin, quipped about Murdoch that she was “a lady not known for the clarity
of her views.”69 It is a sad remark, as Berlin himself was full of self-doubt
on account of the similarly allusive and visionary qualities of his own best
work in the history of ideas. He didn’t think what he did was real philosophy
either, because real philosophy, in that time and place, meant “what Austin
did.” Berlin had on his desk, like a memento mori, a sign he’d picked up
from an auto repair shop, which read simply “Austin.” Even friends like
Mary Warnock, who liked Murdoch and cribbed from her work on
existentialism, mocked her invocations of Simone Weil on loving attention to
others. If she or her husband mislaid their keys, the other would say in a
grave tone, “have you really looked?”70,*
Well before she resigned, Murdoch withdrew from philosophy rather than
try to fill the “void” she saw “in present-day moral philosophy”: the lack of a
“working philosophical psychology . . . .”71 For most of a decade, from her
increasingly marginal position, she had been calling for a recovery of the
detailed, nuanced vocabulary and psychology of the virtues and vices. But
she had novels to write. She had neither the furious passion nor the fearsome
debating skill to go on trying to change her colleagues’ minds, to make her
complaints against Oxford moral philosophy impossible to ignore.
Her “old friend-foe” Anscombe did, though.72 She only needed
provocation.

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* Murdoch’s joy was partly—but only partly—explained by her love for the painting itself. It was also
joy at the restoration of something loved and long withheld. Direct encounters with art were, like
travel, one of the sacrifices of war while it lasted. In June, Murdoch wrote to a friend, in
ecstasies about the first few dozen pictures that had returned to the National Gallery in London:
“Oh heavenly bliss! . . . The Van Eyck man and pregnant wife. Bellini and Mantegna Agonies.
Titian Noli me tangere. Rubens’ Bacchus and Ariadne. El Greco Agony, Rembrandt portraits
of self and of an old lady. His small Woman Bathing (lovely!). A delicious Claude fading into
blue blue blue—blue lake, mountains, sky. Incredible distances to breathe. Two Vermeers, so blue
and lemon, honey stuff, girls at the Virginals. And then oh more Bellini and Rubens, and then the
Ruisdaels, the Hobbemas, and chaps like Cuyp that one had forgotten about. I still feel delirious
with the first shock. It felt really like peace. And all the people wandering around looked dazed.”
(Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, June 1, 1945, in Living on Paper, 43–44).
* MacKinnon may have been responsible for securing Murdoch her position at St. Anne’s the
following year. At the request of Principal Eleanor Plumer, he wrote a joint reference for
Murdoch and Scrutton. Scrutton, MacKinnon told Plumer, was “a very strong candidate”: an
excellent classicist, more experienced, more reliable. The Somerville authorities, he predicted,
would recommend her over Murdoch. But Murdoch, he argued, had greater upside: she was
“more engrossed by . . . the fundamental problems” of philosophy and was thus likelier to
become a really inspiring tutor. (Murdoch, he perceived, was more like him.) The only hint of
their history was this remark: “She is a person who makes a very strong impact on people, and
can easily, without knowing it, influence them a great deal.” Donald MacKinnon to Eleanor
Plumer, June 1, 1948, St. Anne’s College Archives.
* Some interface design is more legible than this!
* It is unclear exactly when Murdoch withdrew from Christianity, but it seems to have coincided with
the period of the atheist Canetti’s greatest influence over her. In 1951, she described herself to a
BBC staffer as Anglican, and she was an active participant from 1948–1953 in a group of High
Anglican philosophers and theologians calling themselves “The Metaphysicals.” Hare, too,
attended sporadically. In 1953, the year she first came powerfully under Canetti’s influence, she
withdrew, remarking to Basil Mitchell that she felt like “more of a fellow-traveller than a Party
member.” See Kelly James Clark, Philosophers Who Believe, (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993), 47.
The change outlasted Canetti, though. And A.N. Wilson reports Murdoch saying to him that
Bayley, not Canetti, “got rid of God.” See Wilson, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (London:
Hutchinson, 2003), 145.
* One wonders too whether Murdoch’s curious but vigorous insistence in interviews that there is little
connection between her novels and her philosophy reflects the internalization of a communal
judgment that the kind of reflection on human motivation and the human condition embodied in
her books doesn’t merit the name “philosophy.” She could simply have been insisting that her
fiction isn’t didactic. But readers of both her novels and her philosophy typically find
preposterous the suggestion that there is no link.

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 Chapter 6

Elizabeth Anscombe versus the World

PROSPERO AND ARIEL

Sunday, January 27, 1957. The light was failing and a daylong gale beginning
to die down as Elizabeth Anscombe closed the door of the cab, gathered her
brown duffel coat around her, and set her face toward Broadcasting House.
The BBC’s art deco headquarters has suggested a battleship to passersby
since it was built, the curved bow of the great, grey edifice cutting through
the asphalt channel of Langham Place. It features a stylized waterline, a
signal deck, an aerial mast. Gazing down on Anscombe as she walked to the
entrance was the ship’s figurehead: Eric Gill’s monumental Prospero and
Ariel. There could have been no more fitting welcome.
Gill, an ardent Catholic convert, was commissioned in 1929 to make
sculptures for both the interior and exterior of the new building. The
cantankerous, earthy Gill, estranged from his increasingly secular fellow
Britons, fashioned a set of works that nod to the Shakespearean material
specified in his commission. But they convey a good deal more of the
Christian gospel—particularly Prospero and Ariel. From his alcove above
the entrance, Prospero towers above the globe like God the Father. He offers
the childlike Ariel to the world. Ariel descends with an ecstatic look, but he
is also naked and vulnerable; his hands, spread in benediction or surrender,
bear stigmata.
Gill seems to have wanted a confrontation. His letters, and later his
autobiography, contain derisive remarks about the BBC and the concept they
had proposed.* (He seems not to have known The Tempest well.) Perhaps
worrying that his work would be gently admired by the Corporation or the
public—and determined not to be gently admired—Gill did something
gratuitously provocative. He made Ariel’s genitalia conspicuously large. Sir
John Reith, Director of the BBC, was notified of the problem before the

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piece was unveiled and called a special meeting of the Board of Governors
up on the scaffolding. One of the Governors, a former public-school
headmaster, is supposed to have offered the decisive judgment: “I can only
say, from personal observation, that the lad is uncommonly well hung.” Gill
made the required adjustments.1
Gill died in 1940. But he and Anscombe would have understood each
other. Like Gill, Anscombe was a zealous Catholic convert in anti-Catholic,
twentieth-century England.2 Like Gill, she had accepted a commission from
the BBC, an institution they both distrusted. Like Gill, her idea was to use her
platform to promote some truths of the faith to a society controlled by its
enemies. Like Gill, she was going to conjure a tempest. She was in London to
record, in her soft, sweet voice, a work of biting irony, titled “Oxford Moral
Philosophy: Does it ‘corrupt the youth’?”

TWICE A CONVERT

Who was Elizabeth Anscombe? We do not have her journal; nor did she ever
write as autobiographically as Scrutton (later Midgley) did. She was the
subject of a hundred anecdotes—some better corroborated than others—
concerning her abrasiveness, her brilliance, her unconventionality. Legend
holds (for example) that Anscombe was once stopped at the entrance to a
restaurant and told women weren’t allowed to wear trousers inside. She
promptly stripped them off. Who was the person behind these stories?3
People who knew Anscombe often remark on the musical quality of her
speaking voice: a quiet alto, sometimes faintly tremulous, but with utterly
precise enunciation.4 Her student Rosalind Hursthouse reminisced that it
“made [her] want to curl up in her lap and be told stories in it forever.”5 Not
that Anscombe’s speech was always gentle. Even as a young woman, she
sometimes spoke in a dreamy, musing tone, sometimes in a scolding, quietly
furious one; each drew dramatic power from the contrast. The mesmeric
force of Anscombe’s voice was heightened too by the cadence of her speech:
slow, deliberate, in perfectly crafted sentences, separated sometimes by long,
reflective pauses.* Her husband Peter Geach claimed that he heard
Anscombe before he saw her. She was seated behind him at a philosophy talk
and offered some comment or question. Impressed both by the voice and by

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what it said, Geach said to himself, “The girl with that voice I mean to
marry.”6
The story of Anscombe’s development through the 1940s and 1950s is one
of discovering or rediscovering her voice. In doing so, she imitated the
English Catholic martyrs whose stories first awakened her imagination to
Catholicism. She wasn’t killed for her faith. But a martyr, in the Catholic
understanding, doesn’t seek death. A martyr is a witness: one who testifies.
Context determines the cost—how much one must endure for one’s testimony.
The mark of a martyr is not death, but readiness to die. This was Anscombe’s
stance: she would testify to the truth, whatever anyone said or did—whatever
the consequences. And like Thomas Aquinas, she came to see the
philosopher’s devotion to truth as entwined with her devotion to God. God is
truth, Aquinas wrote: the source and explanation of all that is.7 Anscombe
eventually came to see service to God and service to the truth as a single
pursuit.
Indeed, Anscombe’s whole outlook on ethics was shaped by Richard
Challoner’s stories of recusant Catholics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century England: tales of priests shuttled up and down the Thames like
passengers on America’s Underground Railroad, celebrating furtive masses
by candlelight, hiding behind false panels while the houses of the faithful
were searched, everyone facing imprisonment or worse. The inspiration
Anscombe took from these stories appears again and again in her later
writings. The ideal of fidelity to the truth, ruat caelum (“though the heavens
fall”), turns up repeatedly, in her discussions of subjects as diverse as
nuclear warfare and contraception. “We have to fear God and keep his
commandments,” she wrote in 1961, “and calculate what is for the best only
within the limits of that obedience, knowing that the future is in God’s power
. . . .”8 In these passages, she can sound very like Sir Thomas More, for
whom she and Peter Geach named one of their sons.
♦♦♦♦
Not long after the teenaged Anscombe discovered the Catholic martyrs, she
discovered philosophy. She picked up Bernard Boedder’s Natural Theology
and found she could not stop thinking about the questions it raised.
Throughout her undergraduate years, and even beyond, this was her
experience of philosophy: as a source of questions she could neither answer
nor dismiss. Philosophy was gripping, tormenting. (Mary Warnock recalled

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Anscombe asking her, in the mid-1940s, “Do you stay awake worrying about
the existence of the external world?”9) Anscombe was seized not only by
Boedder’s argument that everything that happens must have a cause, but by
worries about perception and knowledge. Can we can say we experience
objects like doorknobs or matchboxes—or only brute sensations like colors,
sounds, smells? The latter view, known as “phenomenalism,” was popular in
the late 1930s and early 1940s, in part because of how well it accorded with
Ayer’s ideas. “I always hated phenomenalism,” Anscombe wrote, but “felt
trapped by it.” She couldn’t “see [her] way out . . . .”10 This sense she had of
being “trapped” explains the equally powerful sense of liberation—and
devotion—that Anscombe felt when she began working with Wittgenstein in
the early 1940s.
Wittgenstein had spent much of the war as a hospital orderly in London
and a laboratory technician in Newcastle, returning to Cambridge on
weekends to lecture. Anscombe began attending these lectures almost as soon
as she took up the Sarah Smithson studentship in 1942. In 1944, when
Wittgenstein moved back to Cambridge, Anscombe attached herself to him.
Wittgenstein’s aspiration, in the final phase of his career, was therapeutic. He
saw himself as having been imprisoned by a tidy-minded but ultimately false
picture of language and its relationship to the world. The metaphor is his: “a
picture held us captive.”11 Wittgenstein sought release from his captivity; his
primary audience was himself. His aim was to escape his own imprisoning
pictures by making them explicit, breaking their sense of inevitability. “What
is your aim in philosophy?” he asks himself. His reply: “To shew the fly the
way out of the fly-bottle.”12 But Wittgenstein understood that others were
similarly imprisoned. He and Anscombe were perfectly matched.
Anscombe recorded, in print and in notebooks of reminiscences, how
skilled Wittgenstein was at perceiving the pictures that held others captive.
“Let me think what medicine you need . . . ” he said to her one day as she
articulated the theory of perception she hated so much. And the medicine
worked: “I saw the nerve being extracted,” she wrote.13
The result, initially, was that Anscombe became utterly, abjectly,
Wittgenstein’s votary. She described herself later as having entered a state of
“besotted reverence” in which “almost anything that Wittgenstein said
sounded true and important to me.”14 Not that they never argued: on the
contrary. It was part of the trust Anscombe placed in Wittgenstein that she

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told him exactly what she thought, even when—especially when—her
thoughts appalled her. As we expose our bodies and recount our histories to
physicians, placing a terrible, delicate trust in them, Anscombe exposed her
mind to Wittgenstein. It was in the service of healing, of freedom.
Even before Wittgenstein’s death, Anscombe began working against her
early, uncritical adulation. She had never accepted his views on religion (she
would later remark to a student that “[on] religion, Wittgenstein is sheer
poison.”).15 But her concern was more general. “In philosophy,” she
observed, “overwhelming influence . . . is not good.” Influence could be
good: “influence which improves standards of argument and seriousness,”
especially. But not all: “not influence which makes something seem
convincing because it is a part of X’s teaching.”16
It is unsurprising that Wittgenstein’s influence on Anscombe was initially
“overwhelming.” Anscombe had come to Wittgenstein “trapped” and he set
her free; Wittgenstein was her philosophical savior. Early in Anscombe’s
career, she developed the annoying foible of many devoted students: half-
consciously impersonating her teacher. Mary Warnock recalled how
Anscombe echoed Wittgenstein’s pained gestures, his long silences, even his
Austrian accent. And not only these: she also adopted his superhuman
standards for what was worth saying. Anscombe later recalled Wittgenstein
dismissing his own epoch-making Philosophical Investigations. “It limps”
he said: “If this were philosophy, you could learn it by heart.”17 What chance
did she have of rising to that fearsome standard?
The short-term effects of Wittgenstein’s influence on Anscombe were
almost silencing. A less powerful personality would have been silenced for
good. Her declaration to Murdoch that “no second-rate philosophy is any
good” reflected a long and sometimes brutal apprenticeship in which
nurturing remarks like “[l]et me think what medicine you need” alternated
with descriptions of her works in progress like “bought for a farthing” and
“not house-trained.”18 Small wonder Anscombe never finished her doctoral
thesis. Or that the one original article she published before her translation of
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations contains this disclaimer:
“Everywhere in this paper I have imitated [Wittgenstein’s] ideas and methods
of discussion. The best that I have written is a weak copy of some features of
the original, and its value depends only on my capacity to understand and use
Dr. Wittgenstein’s work.”19

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 Those who studied with Anscombe in her maturity, in the late 1950s and
beyond—Foot, Michael Dummett, Anthony Kenny—insisted that “[n]othing
could have been further from her character and mode of thought than
discipleship.”20 Still, she would say to people for years, “I don’t have a
single idea in my head that wasn’t put there by Wittgenstein.”21 The truth is,
Wittgenstein had converted her. His example of self-criticism and devotion
to truth influenced Anscombe as powerfully as anything he taught her about
language or perception. Working with him, she came to see philosophy not as
a source of nagging, unanswerable questions, but as service to a sacred
cause. What she found in Wittgenstein was a paragon of self-critical
devotion. Anscombe never quoted Kierkegaard’s famous remark about
seeking a truth for which he could live and die, but the sentiment would have
resonated with her.

AUSTIN (II)

Even as she worked toward a purer, more constructive devotion, Anscombe

remained implacably hostile to anyone who failed to acknowledge
Wittgenstein’s genius—especially if that “anyone” was a perceived
competitor for her teacher’s renown. She particularly detested J.L. Austin,
who dominated the postwar philosophical scene at Oxford. She attended
Austin’s classes but made trouble, scarcely containing her disdain. “To think
that Wittgenstein fathered that bastard!” she fumed to Warnock on her way out
one evening.22
What was it about Austin—“wizened, tweedy, pipe-smoking, very
precise”23—that Anscombe hated so much? Austin’s project, recall, was the
patient teasing out of nuances of ordinary language, with the idea that there
are often interesting distinctions embedded in these nuances. We miss the
distinctions and think crude thoughts if, like Ayer, we embrace grand theories
of language and meaning.
Many readers of both Wittgenstein and Austin have observed that they
share some key convictions. Each opposes simplistic theories of language.
Each is thus “anti-theoretical” in outlook, though each tentatively advances
some constructive generalizations about language and thought. In their
constructive modes, each emphasizes the importance of attending closely to
how language is used: “don’t think, but look!” as Wittgenstein wrote.24

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Warnock certainly saw a likeness between them, and said so to Anscombe:
“had [Wittgenstein] not said that he was concerned to destroy houses of
cards?” Wasn’t that exactly what Austin was doing to Ayer’s positivism? It
was a mistake: “Elizabeth . . . turned white with rage. She said that if I
thought there was anything whatever in common between Austin and
Wittgenstein, then I had totally misunderstood everything she had taught me . .
. .”25 Anscombe’s hostility to Austin was reciprocated. He referred to her as
“that ninny.”26 Austin was as cool and genteel as Anscombe was earnest and
blunt; he abhorred her unrefined manner and hot outbursts.
The division between Austin and Wittgenstein, and by extension between
Austin and Anscombe, Warnock concluded, was not one of conflicting claims
about language but of conflicting styles of philosophizing: “but matters of
style can go very deep,” she notes.27 Wittgenstein was deadly earnest, aiming
at healing or liberation from tormenting, entrapping thoughts. Austin, by
contrast, was urbane and witty, dismissive both of grand ambitions and of
dour sobriety. A later commentator remarked that Austin wanted “to exist as
a dry crackle.”28 Mary Warnock’s husband (and Austin disciple) Geoffrey
once recalled to an interviewer how Austin would occasionally read out a
passage from Wittgenstein in a lecture, “to show how incomprehensible and
obscure [he] was, and how easily he could be parodied and dismissed.”
Puzzled by Geoffrey’s admiration of Austin’s behavior, the interviewer
asked: “Were there some things about him that were human?” “Oh, yes,”
Geoffrey replied. “He taught us all absolute accuracy.”29
Though Austin inspired some by his high standards and was lavishly
generous to (certain) colleagues, he was also domineering. Even his most
enthusiastic followers acknowledged it. At the Saturday morning gatherings
he organized, Austin was always the most senior person present. (The
gatherings were popularly called “Austin’s kindergarten.”) The criteria for
invitation seemed calculated to exclude people he didn’t want, like
Anscombe and Murdoch. And although the conversations were freewheeling
and intensely stimulating for Austin’s colleagues, Geoffrey Warnock reported
that they always felt “just a little as if the headmaster were present.”30
This was at a select gathering of friendly, admiring younger faces. In
public venues, Austin crushed dissent. He was a brilliant lecturer, but also
“negative,” “frightening,” “captious,” “dismissive.”31 A colleague recalled
how, in the course of a discussion about different kinds of excuses, a student

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asked what Austin thought about the larger philosophical question of free
will. Austin “was withering, looking down his nose at him, as if he had made
a bad smell.”32 On another occasion, Austin was asked about Gabriel
Marcel, a Catholic existentialist Murdoch admired. Austin retorted: “A
complete fraud. Next question?”33 Austin’s hostility to grand theories like
Ayer’s may have been born of a determination to check hubris. But in
combination with his competitive, intimidating personality, it effectively
suppressed large-scale reflection of any kind. Murdoch’s judgment on Ryle
could be applied equally to Austin: his world was one, she wrote, “in which
people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their
childhood or go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in
love, say prayers, or join the Communist Party.”34
For Wittgenstein and Anscombe both, philosophy was a spiritual activity.
Anscombe was maddened by Austin’s lightness, his unseriousness. As Mary
Warnock noted, “Elizabeth . . . longed to wipe the grin off his face.”35
Anscombe’s character and eccentricities would probably have alienated her
from many of her Oxford colleagues regardless; the animosity between her
and such an adulated figure alienated her further.
It was not natural to her anyway to adhere to a movement, like linguistic
analysis. Her instinct, formed during her years studying under Wittgenstein,
was to criticize her own tribe. Tribalism was antithetical to truth-seeking.

THE LEWIS DEBATE

Anscombe’s 1948 Socratic Club debate with literary scholar and Christian
apologist C.S. Lewis is profoundly illustrative of who Anscombe was, and
was becoming, in the opening years of her career.36
The Socratic Club was founded in 1941, Bosanquet’s, Murdoch’s, and
Scrutton’s last year as undergraduates. A Somervillian, Monica Shorten,
approached an evangelical chaplain, Stella Aldwinckle, complaining that
there was no venue at Oxford for serious discussion of hard questions about
faith. After a couple of loosely organized but heavily attended gatherings at
Somerville, Aldwinckle approached Lewis to ask if he would serve as
President of a new, University-wide club. Lewis agreed, and began inviting
intellectuals within and beyond the University to debate with him and one
another. Aldwinckle was Lewis’s ambassador among women students. A

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South African transplant, she shared Murdoch’s tendency toward easy
intimacy (they formed an enduring friendship). Aldwinckle immediately
struck Murdoch as “a thoroughly serious pure-hearted person.”37, * But it
was the Socratic itself that drew Murdoch and her friends. “Philosophy was
then at its driest,” Murdoch recalled. The Socratic was an oasis. Upon her
return to Oxford, Murdoch began giving occasional talks there. And in
Anscombe’s second year back at Oxford, she agreed to debate Lewis.
Lewis was a philosopher as well as a literary scholar: he had read Greats
back in the 1920s and taught philosophy for a year at University College
before receiving his appointment in English literature at Magdalen. His 1947
book, Miracles, was a work of popular philosophy, responding to David
Hume and other critics of the idea that God acts in the world. In his third
chapter, Lewis attacks what he calls “naturalism”—by which he means a
picture of the world as a self-contained system of cause and effect. He has in
mind the common late-modern idea that physics explains everything: roughly,
the billiard-ball picture. Lewis argues that belief in naturalism undermines
itself. The causes physicists study are non-rational: the mindless operation of
physical forces. Lewis scents trouble for the naturalist in this belief. If
everything is fully explained by non-rational causes, like chemical processes,
magnetic attraction, or one piece of matter colliding with another, then so is
the naturalist’s belief in naturalism. And can anyone trust a belief that is fully
explained by non-rational causes? Like Scrooge, who dismisses his
experience of Marley’s ghost on the grounds that “there’s more of gravy than
of grave” about the apparition, Lewis asks: would you trust a belief if you
knew it was fully explained by what you’d eaten for dinner? In the first
edition of Miracles, he called this “The Self-Contradiction of the
Naturalist.”38
Anscombe liked the Socratic as much as Murdoch and the others did. She
appreciated how wide-ranging its topics were and how the Socratic carried
over conversations from meeting to meeting. The Socratic was serious. But
her first impression of Lewis was that he wasn’t. A letter survives from
Anscombe to Wittgenstein, recounting the debate. In it, she relates how
provoked she was by Lewis’s argument. She initially wrote, she says, a
“rotten” draft of her response full of “pompous indignation at Lewis . . . .”
But her friend and fellow Wittgenstein disciple Yorick Smythies called her
out: “writing ‘Shit!’ against my remarks.”39

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 In the end, Anscombe was faultlessly professional. “I am going to argue
that your whole thesis is . . . specious,” she said, “because of the ambiguity
of the words ‘why’, ‘because’, and ‘explanation’.”40 Briefly, she argued that
there is no such thing as the “full explanation” of a belief. Think of a criminal
investigation. We work to establish not only who committed the crime, but
also how and why. These are different questions, with different answers.
None of them is “the full explanation” of what happened. So too with beliefs,
Anscombe said. There is no reason they can’t have both physical
explanations and rational explanations. But then “the self-contradiction of the
naturalist” dissolves.
The consensus of those in attendance was that Anscombe won—that Lewis
could not effectively answer her criticisms. Anscombe told Wittgenstein she
was pleasantly surprised by Lewis’s behavior: “He was much more decent in
discussion than I expected,” she wrote, “though he was glib.”41 As several of
Lewis’s friends reported, he found the experience devastating; legends have
grown up around it.42 But as Anscombe remarked later to someone asking
about the encounter, a philosopher has a responsibility to criticize bad
arguments, even when they are arguments on the side of her own
convictions.43 Anscombe and Lewis were both Christians, and neither of
them was a naturalist by Lewis’s definition. But Anscombe could never
assess a philosophical issue in terms of team loyalty or victory. She had no
interest in displays of dominance—another thing that divided her from
Austin. Near the end of his life, Bernard Williams recalled about her:
she impressed upon [me] that being clever wasn’t enough. Oxford philosophy . . . had a great
tendency to be clever . . . there was a lot of competitive dialectical exchange, and showing that
other people were wrong. I was quite good at all that. But Elizabeth conveyed a strong sense of
the seriousness of the subject, and how the subject was difficult in ways that simply being clever
wasn’t going to get round.44

It is noteworthy that the question Lewis raised remained with Anscombe. It

was the question that first drew her into philosophy: must everything that
happens have a cause? It returned in the inaugural lecture she gave upon
acceding to Wittgenstein’s Chair at Cambridge in 1971.45 And recalling the
debate in 1981, in the introduction to a volume of her collected papers,
Anscombe wrote: “rereading . . . my criticisms [of Lewis] . . . it seems to me
that they are just. At the same time, I find them lacking in any recognition of
the depth of the problem.” She went on to contrast her own remarks

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unfavorably with the revised argument in the 1960 edition of Miracles,
which corresponded “more to the actual depth and difficulty of the questions
being discussed.” She concluded, “I think we haven’t an answer yet to
[Lewis’s] question . . . .”46 Glibness, for Anscombe, was the great
intellectual vice; recognition that a problem is hard, the great virtue.

“DIRT DOESN’T MATTER”

Anscombe was a research fellow at Somerville, not a regular tutorial fellow,

from her return to Oxford in 1946 until 1958. The first six years, until 1952,
she was supported by the Mary Somerville Research Fellowship. After that,
she was supported by a series of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation,
with a commission to produce translations of Wittgenstein’s late works. But
except for the first six months of 1950, when she was in Vienna working on
her German, Anscombe always did some teaching. Particularly in the early
years, the family needed the money.
After Peter Geach was hired at the University of Birmingham in 1951,
their finances finally improved. The children moved to Oxford, and 27 St.
John Street became the family home—though Anscombe and Geach continued
to practice “telegamy” for decades.47 Now Anscombe had to balance
childcare and teaching.
Anscombe held tutorials in an upstairs room. The house was narrow and
dimly lit, and her two—then three, four . . . seven—children’s things were
scattered everywhere, including in the tutorial room.48 The room would not
have been tidy, regardless. Some of Anscombe’s papers found their way into
a green filing cabinet, but others were piled about, together with unwashed
dishes. On the floor next to the low armchair where Anscombe sat was a
wooden bowl, at least a foot across, filled with water. Stub ends of
cigarettes bobbed on the surface.
Philosophy was serious business, and the older children were given strict
instructions not to interrupt tutorials for anything short of a fire. (Once a car
caught fire in the street outside; one of Anscombe’s children duly notified
her.) But the younger ones would sometimes wander in and climb into their
mother’s lap. Anscombe was capable of maintaining concentration in
circumstances that others would have found unworkable. A washing machine
in the upstairs bathroom was bolted to the floor and made the whole building

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shake. A section of plaster collapsed during one tutorial. Anscombe carried
on.
Committed to philosophy the way a nun or monk is committed to prayer,
Anscombe’s tutorials would sometimes run over by an hour, even two, as she
gave students the experience, not of a discrete lesson, but of doing
philosophy together, as Wittgenstein had done philosophy with her. One
student recalled that “after a session with her my brain was usually so
exhausted I would . . . go to sleep for a couple of hours, regardless of the
time of day.”49 Anscombe liked nothing better than when one of her students
challenged her own or Wittgenstein’s ideas: “You mean you’re fighting
him?” she exclaimed to an undergraduate she had assigned to comment on a
passage in the Investigations. They spent the rest of the tutorial developing
the student’s attack. When Philippa Foot finally began warming to
Wittgenstein’s ideas—much later than Murdoch or Scrutton—Anscombe
commended her for how long it had taken: “it is important to have one’s
resistances.”50 On the other hand, a graduate-student-turned-colleague wrote,
“if I wrote . . . anything with which I thought she would agree, she attacked
me more vigorously than ever.”51
The family had a devoted charwoman who kept entropy in check, washing
the windows and doing the laundry each weekday morning. But outsiders
found the state of the house shocking. (Murdoch, hardly a tidy person herself,
remarked in her journal on the “terrible untidiness” of Anscombe’s house.)52
Anscombe routinely spent long afternoons in the Somerville Senior Common
Room, talking philosophy with Philippa Foot. Once, a social worker
inquired about the welfare of the children and Anscombe (backed by Geach)
fended her off. (An Oxford legend, recounted by Christopher Coope, had it
that the younger children were sent outdoors with labels on their clothing: “If
found wandering please return to 27 St. John Street.”) A student recalled one
of Anscombe’s children approaching her and asking “Can I go out in St.
Giles [a major thoroughfare] and play?” “No dear,” Anscombe replied, “the
police just don’t understand.”53 Literary critic John Carey lived on St. John
Street for a time and wrote an incendiary description of some neighbors who
Mary Geach Gormally says were her family:

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 [T]he house was regularly left in the children’s sole charge. The result was bedlam. The din of
recorded music resounded from the place at all hours, and it never seemed to occur to anyone to
shut a window or moderate the volume. One summer afternoon . . . my patience gave out, and I
crossed the street to protest. As usual, every gaping window blared: it was like knocking at the
door of a reverberating three-storey transistor set. . . . Eventually a teenage girl, one of the
daughters, answered, and . . . I asked if she would mind playing the music a little more quietly. . . .
“Oh,” she said, “it’s no good your complaining about that. The whole street got up a petition about
us once, but it didn’t have any effect.” And with that she shut the door.54

In 1959, the Manchester Guardian ran a profile on Anscombe, one of a

series on successful women professionals. It celebrates Anscombe’s
disregard for convention and her devotion to the central causes of her life.
Though the piece gives a vivid sense of life at 27 St. John Street and of
Anscombe’s dress sense (citing her “disreputable shirt and trousers”) it
leaves out a telling remark she made to the writer. To the question, “How do
you manage a household with a husband and six children while carrying on
your full-time career?,” Anscombe replied, “You just have to realize that dirt
doesn’t matter.”55
♦♦♦♦
This is the key to all the most colorful stories about Anscombe: she drew a
firm distinction between what mattered and what didn’t. She then devoted
herself unreservedly to what mattered. And she spent as little energy as
possible on what didn’t.
What didn’t matter?
The rule at Oxford that women were supposed to wear skirts when
lecturing didn’t matter. But wearing trousers didn’t matter either—she just
liked them—and neither did how she looked, except when it was a question
of honoring someone or something that mattered. So she would bring along a
skirt and pull it on—over her trousers—outside the lecture-room door. “I am
a great stickler for convention and propriety,” she remarked to one bystander,
as she stepped into the required uniform.56 On similar occasions at
Cambridge, later in her career, she used Wittgenstein’s old academic gown
as a makeshift skirt, wrapping it around her waist.57
Self-care (beyond the most basic) didn’t matter, so she smoked like an
engine until the day one of her sons suffered a near-fatal accident. In
desperation, she promised God that she would give up cigarettes if the boy
lived. He did—and she did. (She later took up cigars.)58 And in 1954 she

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shocked Michael Dummett when he showed up to her house to congratulate
her, a day after she’d given birth. There had been a group discussion planned
for that day, but Dummett had heard that Anscombe’s labor had been difficult;
he assumed the discussion was off. It wasn’t. “I found Elizabeth in a dressing
gown and the discussion in full swing,” Dummett recalled; “she merely
glanced at me, remarking that I was late.”*, 59
Delicacy didn’t matter, not in comparison with saying what you meant. So
Anscombe salted her conversation with obscenities, and not only in private.
Reading a paper distinguishing several types of pleasure, Anscombe offered
as one of her examples “shitting,” carefully pronouncing the double “t”.60 She
cultivated an atmosphere in which very little was off-limits. Anthony Kenny
recalled a time when he was an overnight guest of “the Geachcombes” (as
some called them). Anscombe walked into the bathroom while he was in the
tub and sat down on the edge, continuing a conversation they’d been having.
Her name did matter, and she routinely ignored mail addressed to Mrs.
Peter Geach. But other sorts of deference did not, and Anscombe was often
brusque in discussion, dismissing peers whose remarks seemed to her to
show insufficient reflection.61 She did not hold back even when anyone could
perceive that a relationship was at stake. Anscombe vilified Mary Warnock’s
future husband to her face, referring to him as “that shit, Warnock.” And she
berated her undergraduate friend Jean Coutts over her marriage to John
Austin.62 Coutts, gentle and self-effacing, had been a close friend of
Anscombe’s when they were undergraduates. They had gone on long bicycle
rides together as well as talking about Plato and doing their logic exercises
for Martha Kneale. Recalling their break, Coutts would only say, sadly, “at
first we saw a lot of one another; then we didn’t.”63
All this had consequences. As time went on, Anscombe was increasingly
isolated from her colleagues, beyond a small circle of fellow Catholics,
fellow Wittgensteinians, and appreciative students who proudly claimed her
as their own. More magnanimous Oxonians outside these circles
acknowledged her capacity and contribution and made peace with her as best
they could. Others were less tolerant. Isaiah Berlin reviled Anscombe to
BBC producer Anna Kallin:

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 [T]he Wittgenstein intimates—Miss Anscombe and her husband Geach and others—were thinking
of founding a colony in order to live, think, eat and be like Ludwig. Originally it was intended to
invite L. himself, but now that he is dead they propose to establish it anyhow. A great deal of
violent artificial neurosis, not washing etc., anyhow you can imagine—hideous stammering in place
of articulate speech, perverted Catholicism, and all the other delicious attributes.64

Did Anscombe feel her isolation? She must have known how conspicuous
she was in her unbuttoned duffel coat and sandals, sometimes covering her
extropic left eye with an eyepatch or a monacle. Her rages burned hot, then
flamed out; she and Peter Geach even came to speak appreciatively about
Austin. Whatever she thought he had stolen from Wittgenstein, Austin was at
least committed to getting things right. They especially liked a thing he would
say when someone airily asserted that there were “lots of examples” of some
phenomenon: “name three.”65
But many fellow Oxonians didn’t know how to take Anscombe. She
confronted people with the same disconcerting directness that her mentor
Wittgenstein had. Her outbursts and eccentricities struck some (Bernard
Williams, for example) as affectations. But in her journal, Murdoch records
something Anscombe said to her in a moment of vulnerability: that “she felt a
‘clod’ beside the people she most cared for . . . surprised that they tolerated
her.”66 This illuminates an episode from 1948–49 that Mary Scrutton
recalled:
She and Iris and I were having coffee together . . . in the Cornmarket and we were discussing the
meaning of rudeness. . . . This discussion went on quite peacefully until Iris happened to say, “Of
course, the . . . meaning of rudeness might not be all bad. For instance, Elizabeth, I should imagine
that some people might sometimes describe you as ‘rude’?”

Anscombe’s rudeness was “proverbial,” Scrutton said. Scrutton had assumed

that it was a defiant choice. But Anscombe “froze and was wholly silent for a
long time.” Then she stood up, conveyed in a curt speech that she was deeply
insulted, and walked out.67 She had so few people she could rely on. The
suggestion that one of them was enduring her was lacerating.68
♦♦♦♦
Notwithstanding her earned reputation for abrasiveness, when Anscombe
wasn’t in the thick of philosophical argument—or a fight—she was quiet,
even withdrawn. Through the early 1950s, Anscombe refused most
invitations to speak. Two years after the Socratic Club debate, C.S. Lewis

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urged Aldwinckle to bring Anscombe back as a speaker: “having obliterated
me as an Apologist,” he wrote, “ought she not to succeed me?”69 Anscombe
declined.70 Colleague Stuart Hampshire wrote to Anna Kallin at the BBC,
encouraging her to put Anscombe on the air. But when another producer,
Foot’s friend Prudence Smith, reached out, Anscombe replied saying she
doubted her own ability.
Scrutton later observed that Anscombe “was rather shy of talking to
strangers, especially to those who were in any sort of authority. She tended to
regard them as a dangerous alien tribe, and when they were friendly to her
she didn’t know quite how to take it. She was much more at ease in open
warfare.”71 In a postscript to her letter to Wittgenstein after the Lewis debate,
Anscombe wrote: “I find public discussion very difficult indeed. I am in a
frightened hurry to reply to what is said to me; if I try to check this and pause
to think about it, my mind goes blank. So I say a lot that is no use.”72
Nineteen-fifty arrived, then 1953, then 1956, and still Anscombe had
published almost nothing besides her translation of Wittgenstein’s
Investigations.
But in the spring of 1956, the Oxford University administration announced
its intention to bestow an honorary doctorate on former US President Harry
Truman. Truman expressed gratitude, and joked about how he would look in
a “floppy hat.” Anscombe was not amused. Truman was known the world
over for his decisions to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those decisions,
she judged, were wrong—profoundly wrong. Evil. What Truman had done
mattered.

“THE WOMEN ARE UP TO SOMETHING”

Anscombe had published on the traditional Catholic doctrine of Just War

once before, as an undergraduate. She and her friend Norman Daniel caused
themselves and the head of Blackfriars Priory some trouble with their
Archbishop when they wrote and published a short pamphlet opposing the
war. Anscombe was no pacifist, but she and Daniel predicted—rightly—that,
given the Allies’ stated aims, they would eventually descend to intentional
killing of civilians. This, she said, could not be squared with the traditional
criteria of justice in warfare, which require that only just means be used to
prosecute a war. Intentional killing of civilians, she wrote, is not a just
means. Intentional killing of civilians is intentional killing of the innocent—

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that is, murder. Anscombe would press the same objection against Truman’s
degree a decade and a half later. Truman had authorized the incineration of
two cities. These weren’t raids on military targets with incidental civilian
casualties. These were attempts to terrorize the Japanese into surrender by
targeting civilians.
Anscombe’s protest, in late spring 1956, became a minor international
news item. The United Press coverage misidentified her as Gladys
Anscombe, and headline writers on the far side of the Atlantic seemed most
interested in the fact that she was a woman.* The protest failed. Alienated
from most of her colleagues, Anscombe was the worst imaginable political
organizer. She did not even canvass for support. She simply raised her voice
and left the rest to God. On May 1, Anscombe stood to speak at the (usually
sparsely attended) assembly that approved such degrees, and quietly but
firmly denounced the nomination. One quote survives: “if you do this . . .
what Nero, what Ghengis Khan, what Hitler or what Stalin will not be
honored in the future?” But the University administration, forewarned when
Anscombe inquired the day before about procedure, had solicited a crowd to
show up and vote in support of Truman’s degree. “The women are up to
something,” some were told. “We have to go and vote them down.”73 Only
Anscombe, Philippa and Michael Foot (Michael from loyalty, not from
conviction), and Murdoch’s lover Margaret Hubbard voted “non placet” (“it
does not please”).
What infuriated Anscombe most was her colleagues’ passivity. Did they
believe it was all right to kill civilians? Or did they care more about
institutional embarrassment than about the wrongness of murder? Surely they
knew that Truman’s actions were indefensible under international law;
Anscombe advertised a reward of £100 (over £2000 today) for anyone who
could prove otherwise.
The arguments her colleagues did make, she found contemptible. At the
same assembly, Historian Alan Bullock was required ex officio to defend the
nomination. In a pamphlet Anscombe circulated after the May 1 vote but
before the awards ceremony, she remarked drily of Bullock that he had to
“pretend to show that a couple of massacres to a man’s credit are not exactly
a reason for not showing him honour.” “The defence,” she concluded, “would
not have been well received at Nuremberg.”74
What did Anscombe want from Bullock and her other colleagues? She
wanted them to take seriously the foundational precept of Just War theory that

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if the only way to win a battle, or even a war, is by committing an atrocity,
then it is better not to win—better to die, even. Perhaps the heroism of the
English Catholic martyrs is too much to expect of anyone. But if Anscombe’s
colleagues quietly agreed with her, she wanted them to have the courage to
endure a little embarrassment for the truth.
Until 1956, Anscombe had not published anything on ethics except for the
pamphlet she co-authored as an undergraduate. She had a secondhand
awareness of recent developments in ethical theory from discussions with
her Somerville colleague, Philippa Foot. But her scholarly energies had been
almost entirely absorbed, for a decade, in the translation of Wittgenstein’s
later writings. As it happened, at the same time the University was preparing
to honor Truman, and Anscombe was asking herself why “so many Oxford
people should be willing to flatter such a man,” Philippa Foot requested
sabbatical leave. Anscombe agreed to take on some of her colleague’s usual
responsibilities, including tutorials in ethics. These two experiences—the
Truman protest and the reading she was doing in preparation for her new
tutorials—converged in Anscombe’s mind. “I get some small light,” she
wrote, “when I consider the productions of Oxford moral philosophy since
the First World War, which I have lately had occasion to read.”75 None of the
prevailing theories, she found, ruled out the killing of the innocent—murder.
None of them, indeed, ruled out anything. They spoke instead of the free
adoption of principles in a world without values. None of them had room for
Anscombe’s own deepest ethical conviction: that “we have to fear God and
keep his commandments, and calculate what is for the best only within the
limits of that obedience.”76
She included a paragraph about this at the end of her pamphlet on “Mr.
Truman’s Degree.” The result was that in mid-July, a short note arrived from
A.E. Harvey of the BBC Talks Department, asking if Anscombe might
“develop the theme of the relevance of Oxford moral philosophy to situations
such as the one which inspired your pamphlet.”77 Alight with sufficient
indignation to overcome her shyness, she said yes. By the end of October, she
had submitted a script, laced with irony: “Oxford Moral Philosophy: Does it
‘corrupt the youth’?”
Anscombe’s Truman protest had flared up, then died back into obscurity.
Few outside Oxford saw her pamphlet, and—as the vote shows—polite
Oxford society was mostly dismissive of Anscombe’s objections. “[S]he was

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not someone whose doings signified,” one colleague remarked later.78 A
national broadcast was another affair.

The Listener
Anscombe began her talk disarmingly, saying that, in her view, Oxford moral
philosophy does not “corrupt the youth.” But not for any ennobling reason.
No, “in order to show that a . . . teaching corrupts people, you must
obviously show that they have (or would have come to have) better ideas
without this teaching.” In fact, Anscombe argued, “there is no difference at
all” between the teaching of Oxford moral philosophers and the ideas the
youth would absorb outside of the University: “It is . . . a dead level.”
She implied more, though. She implied that the typical Oxford moral
philosopher is a conformist, a “child of his time.”79 Or, at any rate, that he
has no resources in his philosophy (or character?) to resist the worst ideas
and practices around him. After relating a number of what she took to be
fashionable moral opinions (including that “it was right to massacre the
Japanese” at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and setting them alongside views she
had encountered in philosophical discussions in Oxford, Anscombe summed
up: “this philosophy is conceived perfectly in the spirit of the time.” Indeed,
it is “the flattery of that spirit.”80
What did she mean? What features of Oxford philosophy did she have in
mind? Her talk is full of biting and memorable asides:
A . . . point of method which I would recommend to the corrupter would be this: concentrate on
examples which are either banal: you have promised to return a book, but . . . and so on; or
fantastic: what you ought to do if you had to move forward, and stepping with your right foot meant
killing twenty-five fine young men while stepping with your left foot would kill fifty drooling old
ones. (Obviously the right thing to do would be to jump and polish the lot.)

But the talk is also scattered. Whether due to nerves or outrage or simple
limitations of time, Anscombe never lingers over a point. Nevertheless, it is
possible to work out her central concerns.
By 1956, “up-to-date Oxford moral philosophy” meant Richard Hare’s.
And early on, Anscombe made her principal target plain. She anticipated and
deflected the suggestion that Hare could not be a corrupter, “in view of his
obvious moral earnestness.” (Quite the contrary: anyone who wanted to
corrupt people, Anscombe argued, would find earnestness “an important item

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of equipment.”) And at the end, she mocked Hare’s views about moral
education: “Everybody knows that we have long since discarded the hideous
conception of parental authority. . . . In a changing world, with changing
conditions, standards must change; and you must cut your morals according to
your purposes . . . .”81
Hare, recall, held that moral judgments are what he called “universal
prescriptions”: commands (of a sort) issued to oneself and everyone else to
behave in certain ways. If one says that someone “ought” not to steal, then
one is committed not to steal, oneself. But on Hare’s view, our prescriptions
cannot be judged against any criteria other than consistency. They cannot be
judged, particularly, against factual criteria. There are no right or wrong
answers in ethics, only consistent or inconsistent ones. As Hare wrote a few
years later, “we are free to form our own moral opinions in a much stronger
sense than we are free to form our own opinions as to what the facts are.”82
The word “free” is important. It betrays the Romantic, existentialist
element Murdoch identified in her contemporaries’ world-picture. In her talk
and in the debate that followed, Anscombe echoed her friend’s critique. With
no objective criteria for moral judgments, we human beings—reflective
creatures that we are—can only evaluate our options and make decisions in a
condition of lonely freedom. Hare and others like him exhorted their readers
to be adults, to own up to their condition with its attendant responsibilities.
“To become morally adult,” Hare wrote, “is to learn to use ‘ought’-sentences
in the realization that they can only be verified by reference to a standard or
set of principles which we have by our own decision accepted and made our
own. This is what our present generation is so painfully trying to do.”83
So we are free to form the opinion, like Anscombe, that we ought never to
deliberately kill the innocent. But we are equally free to form the opinion that
we ought to kill the innocent if it would serve our strategic aims. Not
believing in any standards above themselves, all theorists like Hare are left
with are “common standards . . . ‘our’ standards, shown by ‘what we say’ in
judging others.” And this, Anscombe suggested, makes them scarcely
distinguishable from the kind of complacent chauvinist who judges
institutions and practices by how well they fit with “our way of life.”84
♦♦♦♦
The irony of Anscombe’s broadcast talk was subtle enough that T.S. Gregory,
her producer, first took the manuscript for “a vigorous defence of Oxford

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morals and moralists” and urged that she quote someone who thought Oxford
moral philosophy was corrupting, if she meant to argue the contrary.85 But
when the piece broadcast on February 5 and then appeared in the BBC
weekly, The Listener, its targets understood it well enough.86 Two of them,
Hare and P.H. Nowell-Smith, wrote letters to the editor that appeared the
next week, filling a tabloid column each. Anscombe, ready for a fight,
replied: “I was glad to read [Hare’s] letter and Mr. Nowell-Smith’s. They
show that what I want to go for is really there.”87
The tone quickly devolved, though, with Hare, Peter Geach, and Anthony
Flew arguing in subsequent issues about whether Hare had suggested that
Anscombe’s talk was obscene, and T.A. Burkill of Woodford Green writing
in to speak for Ayer: “It would appear from the controversy on this topic that
the teaching of ethics in . . . this country is in a chronic state of scientific
impurity.”88 Anscombe’s interlocutors—Hare especially—failed to grasp her
complaint at its root because they were distracted by her rhetoric. In her talk,
Anscombe made a number of throwaway remarks to the effect that Hare’s
(and his contemporaries’) philosophy was “very much in line with” various
forms of cruelty, like evicting widows from their homes (and social workers
pushing people around, “not because they have done anything, but in case
they do”).89 Hare replied that this was outrageous, that he had never
defended any of these things. To which Anscombe replied: I didn’t say you
had. I said “that . . . no one believing [your] philosophy can hold that there is
any solid certainty as to their badness.”90 This was harder to deny. Recall
Hare’s words: “we are free to form our moral opinions . . . .” But
Anscombe’s point was, as Hare complained, buried under “tortuous
sarcasms.”91
Meanwhile, Gregory was in busy private correspondences with both Hare
and Anscombe. Hare had written to Gregory back in January, when he first
learned of Anscombe’s upcoming talk. He dismissed her criticisms of
“Oxford moral philosophy” in the Truman pamphlet as “a complete travesty”
and inquired about the possibility of a rebuttal if she should repeat them on
the air.92 Gregory sent Hare an advance copy of Anscombe’s script so he
could make an informed judgment. All along, Hare framed Anscombe to
Gregory as unhinged. Writing just after the broadcast aired, he wrote, “After .
. . taking a sample of the impressions of other listeners, lay and professional,
I think a reply would be a mistake. The professionals found it unclear and

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inaccurate, and the laity did not understand it at all. . . . [N]othing should be
done which would increase Miss Anscombe’s resentment against mankind,
which has begun to alarm those who know her.”93
While Hare weighed his options, Anscombe rapidly composed a second
script, titled “Principles,” and submitted it for consideration. Hare’s and
Nowell-Smith’s first letters to the editor had not yet appeared. But Hare’s
private correspondence had done its work. The Talks Committee rejected
Anscombe’s script, plainly with Gregory’s concurrence, on the grounds that it
was too personal an attack. Gregory conveyed the news. Anscombe replied:
is that the real reason for the rejection? I.e. would you accept it if the personalities were removed?
This is an attack on something that is strong both in Oxford and in the world; and something that
you never hear attacked on the BBC at all. It appears to me that you have some personal
responsibility for the constant outpouring of solemn blasphemy and corrupt morality; at least if you
do not do what you can to secure the acceptance of scripts which really do something lively to
oppose it. Would you have accepted the first one if you had understood it?94

That stung; Gregory was a Catholic, and he and Anscombe were acquainted
independently of the BBC. He drafted a heated reply that, after some internal
discussion at the BBC, he was forbidden to send. Getting no reply from
Gregory, Anscombe began dropping barbed remarks into her letters to the
editor: “I feel confident that the linguistic analysis philosophers are a
sufficiently strong pressure group . . . to ensure that such dreadful things will
never again be allowed on the Third [Programme].”95
Gregory’s unsent reply is interesting for a number of reasons, including its
dishonest or misremembering insistence that he had never missed the point of
Anscombe’s “Oxford Moral Philosophy” script. But its greatest interest lies
in an allusion Gregory makes to the content of the rejected script: “you say
that anyone can do anything on principle, and if you have a large enough
stock of principles you can select as you please the one to justify the
particular wrong doing you favour.”96 That sentence resembles some things
Anscombe says in an article she published the following year. And that
article, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” would become one of the most cited
philosophical publications of the twentieth century. We may have the
decision of Gregory and the BBC Talks Committee partly to thank for a
major shift in Anglophone moral philosophy.97

“IS” AND “OUGHT”

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Freed from the constraints of a broadcast script, Anscombe backed up and
considered the characteristically Wittgensteinian question her friend
Murdoch had been asking: what picture stood behind the moral theories of
her time? Like Murdoch before her, Anscombe looked to modern intellectual
history to explain how the dominant picture emerged. But she went beyond
this to ask a different question: what could be put in its place? Here she made
a decisive suggestion, one that most of her contemporaries were unprepared
to consider yet: that they return to the ethical outlook people left behind at the
beginning of the modern period, when people first adopted the billiard-ball
picture. That they return to Aristotle.
Anscombe begins by attacking the only argument that any of her
contemporaries ever gave for the fact–value dichotomy. This argument,
adapted from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, had been reduced to
a slogan: no “ought” from an “is.”98 The point is a logical one: you don’t
have a proper deduction if terms appear in your conclusion that do not
appear in your premises. This, for instance, is not a valid deduction:
1. All human beings are mortal.
2. Socrates is a human being.
3. So, Socrates is an Athenian.

♦♦♦♦
Where did the term “Athenian” come from? Not from either of the premises,
1 or 2.
So Hume wrote:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the
author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a
God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find,
that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is
not connected with an ought, or an ought not. . . . [A]s this ought, or ought not, expresses some
new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that . . . a reason should be given, for what seems
altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are
completely different from it.99

Hare called this principle “Hume’s Law”; it was another way of articulating
the fact–value dichotomy. Facts are properly expressed in descriptive
language: “ises.” Values are properly expressed in evaluative language:
“oughts.” Thus, to say, no “ought” from an “is,” is the same as to say, no

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value from a fact. That NASA’s readings of average global surface
temperature have increased by one degree Celsius over the past 50 years is a
fact. What (if anything) ought to be done about this cannot be deduced from
the fact.
Anscombe’s attack begins with an acknowledgment of the logical point:
any inference from “is” to “ought” is not a strict deduction. But that doesn’t
mean that such an inference can’t be rational; there are other kinds of rational
inference besides deduction. Anscombe points out that lots of plainly rational
inferences would be excluded if the only kind of rational inference were
deduction. Consider inferences from “is” to “needs.” Surely what an
organism—a plant, say—needs is grounded in facts. But consider this
argument:
1. Blueberries first rust, then die if there is insufficient iron in the soil.
2. So blueberries need soil with sufficient iron in it.

♦♦♦♦
Someone making this argument could be charged with introducing a term in
the conclusion (“need”) that was not present in the premise. The inference
involved is interesting, and merits philosophical exploration. It has roots in
Aristotle, with his notion of the proper function of an organ or organism.
(What an organ or organism must have in order to thrive, it needs.) But the
inference isn’t at all dubious, and it raises the question: why shouldn’t we
regard “ought” the same way we regard “needs?” (Indeed, mightn’t one infer,
after some soil testing, “I ought to amend the soil around these
blueberries”?)
A second main thesis of “Modern Moral Philosophy” also points back to
Aristotle. Anscombe suggests that unless Hare and others believe in a divine
lawgiver, they should stop insisting on making ethics all about principles.
The vocabulary of principles, she suggests—including words like “duty” and
“obligation”—is the vocabulary of a legal system. It made sense in contexts
where most people understood themselves to be governed by a divine law.
But if one doesn’t believe in a transcendent law and lawgiver—as she did,
but as many of her contemporaries did not—then why go on making ethics
about systems of principles?
Actually, she says, this secularized talk of principles is a source of
corruption. If one doesn’t believe in a legislator who has imposed particular

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obligations (like, “thou shalt not murder”), one is left to ask, in a completely
unguided way, “what principles should we adopt?” And with no criteria to
guide one’s answer to this question, one can marry an atmosphere of moral
seriousness to any sort of behavior. The sensible course for a secular thinker
—and maybe, for anyone—would be to express one’s moral judgments in a
different vocabulary, one that offers real guidance. Anscombe recommends
the traditional Aristotelian vocabulary of vice and virtue. The advantage of
terms like “ ‘unjust’ over the terms ‘morally right’ and ‘morally wrong’,” she
argues, is that “unjust” has some guiding content. It means something.
Suppose you’re considering appeasing a mob by punishing someone for a
crime he didn’t commit. The terms “morally right” and “morally wrong” get
you nowhere in thinking about the case—or not if you accept Hare’s view.
On Hare’s view, you simply ask yourself what principles you are willing to
accept. But the action is clearly unjust. This is a paradigm case of injustice.
If “unjust” means anything, it means things like this. And thus your thought
can find ground.*
If we can return to Aristotle. If we can make sense of the idea of a human
being’s proper function, of a characteristically human pattern of life. If so,
then we could, with Aristotle, begin to work out a table of the traits that
enable people to live vibrantly successful (Anscombe’s word was
“flourishing”) human lives, and build an account of ethics on that footing. To
do so would require that ethics draw seriously on biology, psychology,
anthropology, and more. And before turning to those disciplines, it would
require breaking out of the billiard-ball picture, with its overlay of the
Dawkins sublime.

WHAT CAME OF IT

As the correspondence in The Listener was winding down in late March

1957, a sympathetic reader, Hugh Heckstall-Smith, asked Anscombe if she
would briefly articulate her “starting-point” in ethics. What would she say, in
contrast to the subjectivism of Hare? Anscombe replied:
Mr. Heckstall-Smith’s demand is unreasonable. It is as if he were to say, “But what’s your starting-
point when you speak of cancer as really a disease?” If the world were full of doctors saying
“ ‘disease’ is really only an objection-expressing term” and acting accordingly, and someone
objected to them, it would not be reasonable to say, “Just state your starting-point in a few
words.”100

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She meant it. Through the late winter and early spring of 1957, as the
correspondence columns in The Listener throbbed with rage, Anscombe was
polishing up one of the few pieces of general ethical theory she would ever
write, “Modern Moral Philosophy.” But she was also giving the lectures that
would become her slender but influential primer on the philosophy of action:
Intention. Intention is not a work of ethics—though Anscombe hoped it
would clarify some crucial background concepts. Anscombe’s judgment was
that any real, constructive work in moral philosophy was a long way off: as
she wrote, “it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy.”101
How do you talk medicine with people who think that “disease” is only an
objection-expressing term? How do you even begin?* And so, in the coming
years, apart from some explicitly Catholic reflections on topics like nuclear
weapons and contraception, Anscombe walked away from ethics. Her next
project after Intention was An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
When fellow philosopher Mary Mothersill asked her to name a work for
which she would like to be remembered, Anscombe replied, “My
Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” She had no interest in debating
with Hare or in replacing his theory with one of her own.
Her task, as she saw it, was to resist destructive madness. And her
temperament would not have allowed her to engage in patient give-and-take
over views she found abhorrent. In 1958, Anscombe was on the Third
Programme once more (and for the last time) with Glanville Williams, a
Cambridge law professor who had just written a book espousing permissive
views on abortion and euthanasia. It was a profoundly awkward broadcast,
in which Williams spoke genially with a doctor and an anthropologist while
Anscombe listened silently. When the host finally turned to her, she
denounced Williams’ views as inhuman:
We want to have everything pleasant about us and we shall see to it that it is . . . . Affliction is
offensive to us, the solution is to prevent or stop the existence of the afflicted, not to mend their lot;
if our comfort is threatened by the need to feed too many mouths, we’re not going to put ourselves
out, it’s much simpler to use contraception, sterilization and abortion to cut out the superfluous
mouths.102

The conversation then continued as if nothing had been said. What could they
say? What meeting place could there be between them?
Reflecting back with dissatisfaction on one of her essays on the ethics of
war, Anscombe wrote, “if I was torn by a saeva indignatio [“savage

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indignation”], I wish I had had the talent of a Swift in expressing it.”103 The
comparison to Swift is apt. Like Anscombe, Swift was a person painfully out
of step with the world around him but determined to seize its attention and
make it think again. But she had done that much; she had smashed any sense
that theories like Hare’s were the only ones a modern person could
responsibly hold. And she had suggested a way forward.
She was happy enough if someone else wanted to take it from there.

* In his autobiography, Gill writes: “Very clever of the BBC to hit on the idea, Ariel and aerial. Ha! Ha!
And the BBC kidding itself, in the approved manner of all big organizations (British or foreign,
public or private), that it represents all that is good and noble and disinterested—like the British
Empire or Selfridges . . . .” See Eric Gill, Autobiography, (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1968),
261.
* An anecdote, retold by many sources: Anscombe is supposed to have said to Ayer once, “if you
didn’t talk so quickly, people wouldn’t think you were so clever.” To which Ayer is supposed to
have replied, “if you didn’t talk so slowly, people wouldn’t think you were so profound.” See,
among others, John Haldane, “Elizabeth Anscombe,” The Herald, January 9, 2001, 28.
* Scrutton, less free-spirited, found Aldwinckle intrusive. Anscombe for her part was scornful of
Aldwinckle’s evangelical piety. Bernard Williams recalled an occasion when Aldwinckle declared
that she had a “personal relationship with God”—to which Anscombe replied, “what bloody
cheek!” (Letter from Bernard Williams to Peter Conradi, KUAS6/3/166, Kingston University
Archives. Used by permission of Mrs. Patricia Williams.)
* Another story—possibly legendary—recounts her trying to schedule a tutorial: “I have a meeting on
Monday; I’m giving a lecture in London on Tuesday; I’m having a baby on Wednesday;
Thursday would work.” (Nicholas Denyer, conversation with author, June 29, 2012).
* Two headlines: “Woman Opposes Truman Degree” and “Oxford Honors Truman Over Woman’s
Protest.”
* Some readers will wonder how Anscombe harmonized her belief in God as a lawgiver with her
recommendation of the Aristotelian vocabulary of virtues and vices. Did she recommend the
Aristotelian vocabulary for others, but not for herself? Up to a point, yes. About belief in God as
a lawgiver, she remarked, “you can do ethics without it, as is shown by the example of Aristotle.”
Aristotelian ethics was, she judged, the best that secular thought had to offer. But in her own
thinking, Anscombe harmonized Aristotelian and Christian ideas, drawing on the earlier synthesis
of medieval philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas. Very cursorily, Aquinas holds that God’s
law guides us toward the virtues we need to flourish as human beings.
* As she writes near the end of “Modern Moral Philosophy,” “if someone really thinks, in advance,
that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the
innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he
shows a corrupt mind.”

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 Chapter 7

The Somerville Senior Common Room

A DAY IN THE LIFE (I)

November 1956.1 Philippa Foot looked haggard most days as she mounted
the stairs up to Somerville Hall for lunch. When she wasn’t delivering the
meticulous lectures for which she was known around the University, she was
giving tutorials, sometimes back-to-back-to-back. Anscombe could afford to
give multi-hour tutorials to the carefully selected students assigned to her by
Somerville—or occasionally, grudgingly, by colleagues.* She was
principally supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. For Anscombe, every
tutorial was an open-ended chance to do philosophy. The first- and second-
year students who simply needed the basics—on whatever topic, from logic
to ethics to Kant—fell to Foot. They got the best she could offer within the
fixed hour, but then she had to move on. She routinely filled 11 or 12 hours a
week just with her regular lessons. Ten was a full load. For her long-time
colleague, Barbara Harvey, one enduring image of Foot was “her coming into
lunch after a morning’s tutorials, with a look of complete exhaustion on her
face.”2 Foot desperately needed her upcoming sabbatical.
Students fearful of the philosophy portion of the syllabus found Foot
encouraging. She invariably found something to praise even in the weakest
essays. Her tactfulness could be comic. One student recalled Foot saying “I
see you’ve thought about this,” leaving the rest to be inferred: you didn’t do
the reading.3 But she always offered criticism, too, pushing students toward
the exactitude that was the highest virtue in Oxford philosophical circles.
“More than anyone in Oxford,” a student recalled, “Philippa . . . helped me to
grow up. I was clever, but terribly opinionated. She wouldn’t stand for it; she
insisted I justify my wilder statements, but . . . so gently that I responded.”4
As Rosalind Hursthouse recalled, whenever she showed Foot her work, Foot

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“radiat[ed] support—so interesting, she particularly liked the point about
such and such.” “[H]appily reassured that I was not a fool,” Hursthouse said,
“I would enjoy every minute of the subsequent discussion, and leave eager to
throw myself into the needed rewriting . . . [which] was usually total
because, in our enjoyable discussion, she had incisively torn the original
paper into shreds.”5
Some students, of course, were intimidated by Foot, the way Mary
Scrutton had been intimidated by her back in 1939: “her standards, I felt,
would be very high, could I hope to meet them?”6 All of Foot’s surface
attributes—her accent, her sharp but conservative dress sense—suggested
primness. And most Somervillians were at least vaguely aware of Foot’s
grand origins. As they came to know her, though, they came to rely on her.
What Donald MacKinnon had done for her and for Murdoch, Foot did for a
new generation of young women: she never refused a request for counsel or
support. The result was that students booked appointments with her at odd
hours to talk about their extracurricular problems: lost love, unexpected
pregnancy, harassment. She gave them time—and strength—beyond what she
could spare. If she had a few minutes between tutorials, she would lie down.
She would lie down during tutorials if she could, in an adjustable armchair
that snapped into its reclined position with a crack like a gunshot. That was
when she didn’t need to spend the hour doing demonstration logic exercises
in her spidery hand.
Foot arrived at lunch most days, wrung out. And though she needed to eat,
the experience of lunch in Hall was seldom rejuvenating. Thanks to the
kitchen-table operation she’d undergone as a child, Foot was deaf in one ear.
The din of the undergraduates, resounding off the oak-paneled walls of the
large, round-vaulted room, made it hard to converse even up at high table.
Each day she retreated, as soon as seemed decent, down to the Senior
Common Room. That was where she truly came back to life.
♦♦♦♦
The Senior Common Room (SCR) at Somerville College is a grand Victorian
parlor with papered walls, white wooden trim, and a worn rug over dark
wood floors; large, 16-paned windows look out over the College lawn.7, * A
miscellany of armchairs and tea tables is scattered along its length, from the
entrance opposite the fellows’ private dining room to the fireplace at the far

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end. Flanking the fireplace is a pair of fireside stools, upholstered in a floral
pattern of red and blue over dull gold.
Afternoon by afternoon, term by term, from the late 1940s through the late
1960s, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot made for these stools, sat
down, and started talking philosophy.8 Anscombe generally proposed the
topic. It was conversation between colleagues and friends. It was an
uncompensated tutorial. Over time, Foot realized that they were probably
discussing the same topics Anscombe had once discussed with Wittgenstein.
In Foot, Anscombe found the kind of interlocutor she prized: someone who
took philosophical discussion as seriously as she did, someone hostile to the
“affected frivolity” that characterized many of their male colleagues,9
someone who would never yield just to please her, someone she could
mentor in the same, sustained way that Wittgenstein had mentored her.
In Anscombe, Foot found someone to keep her from stagnating under the
burden of her teaching. There was little pressure to publish in mid-century
Oxford. But the corollary was that there was little time for junior fellows to
write—or even to think about anything besides their upcoming tutorials or
lectures. In effect, Anscombe did for Foot day after day what Austin did for
his (male) junior colleagues in their famous Saturday morning meetings.10
Anscombe provoked and befuddled Foot, led her into perplexities, made her
think and rethink. For a few hours each afternoon, Foot’s tutorial burden and
everything else vanished. Colleagues came and went from the SCR, making
no impression. For Barbara Harvey, this image stayed with her as vividly as
the image of Foot dragging herself into Hall at lunchtime: Foot revived,
absolutely alert, perched on her stool as she and Anscombe sat “tearing up
Wittgenstein” together.11 They were usually still at it in the late afternoon
when the tea tray arrived.
♦♦♦♦
In mid-century Oxford, afternoons were seldom used for formal instruction.
The latest start time for lectures was noon. But late-afternoon/early-evening
instruction and discussion groups were common (a survival from a time
when Oxford dons were unmarried and had no domestic life outside their
colleges). Off and on, through the late 1950s, Anscombe held once-a-week
graduate classes or informal discussions of Wittgenstein’s Investigations in
Bedford House, a dilapidated, drafty little building enmeshed in nettles, lying
at the southwest corner of the College grounds. The building was known as

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“the shed behind Somerville,” and Anscombe’s discussions as the “Bible
Reading Fellowship.”12 But most philosophy graduate students attended, and
many of Anscombe’s colleagues, including Austin. And Foot. She had
apprenticed herself to Anscombe and was going to miss nothing that her
Somerville colleague said.
It was late one evening in November 1956, then—surprisingly late—when
Harvey, in her second year on staff, heard a great clanking begin below her
bedroom. She lived above the office of the treasurer, and she thought she had
better investigate. She found Foot, bleary but determined, running off copies
of an appeal for refugees from the crushed Hungarian Uprising of the month
before. Between teaching and lunch and discussion with Anscombe, there
had been no time earlier in the day. The ad hoc relief group which Foot
served as treasurer would soon raise the contemporary equivalent of a
million pounds and bring dozens of Hungarian students to Oxford, like the
Jewish refugees of the 1930s and 1940s. Several of them stayed with the
Foots at 16 Park Town.13
Did Philippa and Michael even see one another during term-time? In
passing, at least. They shared a bed and occasional meals. And they looked
forward each year to their summers in a primitive cottage at Connemarra, on
the Irish coast. But it was hard to find time for much more.

Noblesse Oblige?
Foot spent her whole adult life in flight from her upbringing. Her decision to
go to university at all was a rebellion. And her parents were taken aback by
the company she kept afterward. Murdoch visited the Old Hall at
Kirkleatham during the war and shocked Esther Cleveland Bosanquet one
evening by laying her head on the table after dinner—and another time by
going into the kitchen and making herself a sandwich.14 Foot reveled in the
freedom of her Seaforth days, and in the modest life she and Michael began
to make afterward—even if other women couldn’t help noticing that her
clothes were always better than theirs: “conspicuously not home-made.”15
When she finally left Somerville in 1969 and began spending most of her
time in the United States (chiefly California), she exulted in an environment
in which none of the distinctions she had internalized as a child existed: in
which students put their bare feet on the desks in front of them and colleagues
smoked joints at parties.

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 But we seldom entirely shed the dominant influences of our childhoods.
Often, instead, we transmute them, like ex-evangelicals who go on seeing the
world in terms of the saved and the damned—only reversing the labels. Foot
chose Somerville over Lady Margaret Hall, she said, because it had a
reputation as “intellectually but not socially snobby.”16 Foot yearned for
distinction—but in things that mattered. She certainly couldn’t unlearn the
way she talked or the fact that, like an experienced birder, she perceived
details that many around her did not. In a late interview about her long-
running involvement with Oxfam, she mentioned in passing an early
supporter, “Lady Mary Murray.” She then paused, noticing what she’d
noticed: “If you’re called ‘Lady Mary’ somebody, you’ve got to be terribly
grand, much grander than being called ‘Lady Murray.’ It’s the kind of thing I
knew. I hated it, this sort of knowledge: I can’t help it, I know this.”17 Unable
to unlearn these things, she eventually began using them as comic illustrations
in her philosophical writings (e.g., “It is rude to wear flannels at a formal
dinner party, but merely not done to wear a dinner jacket for tennis”).18 The
effect was always an ironic reminder to her audience that she descended
from a different stratum.
Perhaps as significant as any of these vestiges of her upbringing was the
drivenness Foot shared with her mentor, MacKinnon. She was never
physically robust. More than once during her Somerville career she was
forced to take extended sick leave.19 But like MacKinnon, she worked
herself to exhaustion, worked as if to atone for something. She taught more
students than her colleagues did. She taught herself Greek. After her
undergraduate roommate and best friend, Anne Cobbe, joined the Somerville
SCR in 1955, the two of them became a force in College governance. They
discussed everything together. And they made themselves into Somerville
Principal Janet Vaughan’s right and left hands. All along, Foot gave herself to
other causes, like the students fleeing the aftermath of the Hungarian
Uprising. And Oxfam.
♦♦♦♦
The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief was formed in 1942 by a cluster of
activist Quakers and prominent Oxford citizens, including furniture and real-
estate magnate Cecil Jackson-Cole. The initial purpose of the Committee was
ambitious but narrow: to get food to starving people in occupied and
blockaded Greece. After the war ended and continental Europe began to get

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back on its feet, it was a question whether the Committee should dissolve,
like the UNRRA. The Committee decided instead to broaden its mission.
Jackson-Cole in particular helped bring an entrepreneurial approach to
Oxfam. His own business ventures were always built to support charitable
activities as well as turn a profit. He did more than anyone to turn Oxfam into
one of the world’s largest anti-poverty organizations, funded by an
experimental new model: a chain of second-hand clothing stores. Charity
shops, like the ones you find on every British High Street today.
Foot began working for Oxfam shortly after she and Michael returned to
Oxford.20 Jackson-Cole had put an ad in the newspaper, soliciting volunteers
to help sort and pack donated clothes to send to Germany. Foot hardly needed
more to do, but she was always moved to offer herself. And sorting clothes
made an oddly refreshing break from Greek and from teaching. She began
working regular shifts in a commercial building off Oxford’s Gloucester
Green (the market square adjacent to the bus station), sorting ready-to-wear
items from “shabby, unmended.”
More refreshing than the work itself were the people. Foot had never
known Quakers, the original core of Oxfam. They were a revelation. If Foot
had had any worry when she volunteered—other than how she would find the
time—it was whether charity work would re-immerse her in the social world
of her childhood. After all, Lady Mary Murray was involved. “[M]ost
charities in those days,” as she told an interviewer in the 1990s, “were . . .
dominated by titled ladies and county people opening fairs. You know, the
local landowners, Lady so-and-so, would open the bazaar. . . . I hated that
background,” Foot said, “and escaped from it.”21 But Oxfam was the
antithesis of all that. Letters from Oxfam were (and are) addressed, “Dear
Friend,” and Foot quickly discovered that the organization was pointedly
egalitarian, giving no special authority or honor to people on account of
worldly prestige: “the only colonel who sat on the committee was Colonel
Widdowson . . . but where was Colonel Widdowson a colonel? In the
Salvation Army.”22 The committee met in the front window of their building
at 17 Broad Street: a literal interpretation of transparency.
In 1948, Foot herself was noticed. Not because she was President
Cleveland’s granddaughter or because she was an Oxford alumna. Rather,
because of what she did one lunchtime when a van showed up unexpectedly
to collect boxes of clothes. Foot had lingered after her shift to do a little
more sorting and was the only one in the building. She knew where the

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packed boxes were stored and figured out how to work the lift to bring them
down to the loading area. She was asked if she’d like to join the Committee.
She said yes, and was an early supporter of Jackson-Cole’s controversial
proposal to raise funds by selling donated clothing, rather than trying to give
everything away—high-heels and all.
Did Foot leave behind the social world of her childhood? Yes and no. She
admired organizations like Oxfam and Somerville that were practical and
unfussy, where no one cared about “your people” or whether you said
“napkin” or “serviette.” It is small wonder that she and Anscombe gravitated
to one another; each drew sharp—and partly overlapping—distinctions
between what mattered and what didn’t. But Foot’s organizational leadership
and charity work was also a transmutation of noblesse oblige. This was what
privileged people did. As Harvey observed: Foot didn’t leave behind her
background; she enlarged it.
There was one thing that mattered to Foot, though—one form of self-giving
—that she couldn’t simply choose. She and Michael wanted a child. Writing
to Principal Janet Vaughan in early 1947, she requested a contract
adjustment.23 She noted how much time she was putting into learning Greek
(at Somerville’s request) and into her teaching. She wasn’t going to ask
Michael to take over the household; he had already lost half a decade (and
nearly his life) as a soldier. If Foot was going to be able to look after a baby
or pay for help, she needed less teaching or more pay. Though she sometimes
ignored them, she had limits.
She got the adjustment. She and Michael started trying.

“IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE ONE’S RESISTANCES”

With hindsight, it is easy to think of Foot’s philosophical trajectory as

inevitable. She apprenticed herself to Anscombe. Anscombe taught her
Wittgenstein’s methods and argued that modern moral philosophers should
recover some of Aristotle’s ideas—in particular, his concepts of virtue and
vice and of a flourishing human life. Foot took her colleague’s suggestion and
developed it. And Anglophone moral philosophy was never the same.
It is half true.
♦♦♦♦

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The fuller truth is messier. The sketch above leaves out MacKinnon and
Murdoch and Scrutton, Locke and Kant and Nietzsche—even Ryle and Hare
and Austin. And it leaves out how slow and juddering Foot’s development
was. Foot was the most protean of her friends, undergoing more dramatic
shifts of outlook than any of the others. She published her only monograph in
2001, at age 80, and only committed to the central theses of that book in the
1990s. And Natural Goodness was not the most influential thing she wrote. It
was an earlier metamorphosis that led to her making her most decisive
contribution, one she was seemingly born to make. And even the route to that
point was tortuous.
♦♦♦♦
How did Foot appear to her professional peers in the late 1940s? In 1948,
Vaughan asked Gilbert Ryle for some comparative observations about
Anscombe and Foot.24 After observing that “Miss Anscombe has real
philosophical power” (citing the Lewis debate), Ryle wrote,
Mrs. Foot strikes me as being a much more normal Oxford product—sensible, studious, careful,
open-minded but tame. I should be surprised to hear of her making a new sort of philosophical
move. If I & some of my colleagues heard that Miss Anscombe & Mrs. Foot had made
contributions to a discussion, I think we should at once ask “What line did Miss Anscombe
take?”25

Ryle allowed that this prejudice might not be entirely fair, that Foot might
have unsuspected abilities. But he also said: if he hadn’t seen it by now . . . .
Whatever disquiet Foot felt about logical positivism and its implications,
and whatever lively conversations she was having with her friends about
“rudeness” (when she wasn’t too exhausted to stay awake), in the late 1940s
Foot didn’t see yet how to resist the outlook of emotivists like Ayer and
Stevenson. Not knowing what to say about ethics, she immersed herself
instead in the figures and topics that had first drawn her into philosophy:
Kant and Locke, and the relationship between mind and world.26 She threw
herself into these studies the way she threw herself into everything.
But Kant and Locke were also evasions: “sensible . . . tame” topics, not
what really troubled her. At a Christmas party, shortly after her return to
Somerville, Austrian émigré Friedrich Waismann struck up a conversation
with Foot and asked about her work. She explained that she was trying to
understand Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. Waismann wished her every

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success. The following year, at another party, they found themselves in
conversation again, and he asked again about her work. Nothing had changed,
and she gave him the same answer. “Mrs. Foot,” he shouted, “you are a lost
woman!”27 The encounter shook her; she recounted it later to a student. Was
she wasting her time? What was she supposed to be doing?
What did she even think? She wasn’t sure. Her friendship with Murdoch
had turned her into a more eclectic reader than most of her colleagues: all her
life, she would be reflecting on Turgenev, Nietzsche, Proust, Gide. (Hare by
contrast read no fiction at all, deputizing his wife to read Murdoch’s novels,
so he would have some idea what was in them.)* But unlike Murdoch, who
tried to bring Kierkegaard and Marx, Freud and Sartre into fruitful
conversation with her contemporaries, Foot saw no way to do this. She
compartmentalized.
To the extent that she thought about ethics at all, her thoughts were
conventional. It was perfectly possible to take a philosophical interest in
concepts like “rudeness” and yet not shake loose from the billiard-ball
picture and the fact–value dichotomy. Foot was living proof.28 Years later,
she remembered a moment when she said to Anscombe that some statement
must involve a mixture “of descriptive and evaluative meaning.” She
experienced a familiar feeling of befuddlement when Anscombe retorted, “Of
what? What?” And Foot thought, “my God, so one doesn’t have to accept that
distinction! One can say what?!”29 Anscombe could have had no more ideal
protégé, none who better understood what philosophical discussion is for.
Foot resisted Anscombe and yet turned to her in exactly the way
Anscombe had resisted and turned to Wittgenstein. Foot recalled that, in their
afternoon conversations, and in Anscombe’s classes, she “opposed nearly
everything [Anscombe] said.” “Naturally,” she said, “I was regularly
defeated. But I would be there, objecting away, the next week. It was like in
those old children’s comics where a steamroller runs over a character who
becomes flattened—an outline on the ground—but is there all right in the next
episode.”30 This went on for half a decade. Then, without Anscombe ever
urging it on her, Foot picked up Wittgenstein’s Investigations and began
reading it. Prepared by the stimulus and frustration of her years-long
exchange with Anscombe, Foot had something like a conversion experience.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked Anscombe. “Because it is very
important to have one’s resistances,” Anscombe replied.31 The best way to

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understand Wittgenstein, Anscombe thought, is to argue against him until you
see what he is getting at.
The first effects of Anscombe’s mentorship on Foot, then, were twofold.
First, Foot abandoned the notion that she needed to have a fully worked-out,
polished view in order to enter discussion. She adopted as a maxim
something she had heard Wittgenstein say, the one time he had spoken
publicly at Oxford:
Wittgenstein interrupted a speaker who had realized that he was about to say something that,
although it seemed compelling, was clearly ridiculous, and was trying (as we all do in such
circumstances) to say something sensible instead. “No,” said Wittgenstein. “Say what you want to
say. Be crude and then we shall get on.”32

Anscombe freed Foot to think out loud. Second, and relatedly, Foot finally
began to do sustained and distinctive work on the topic that she’d known
since the mid-1940s she wanted to address: ethics.
♦♦♦♦
Foot’s first professional publication, in 1952, appeared on the cusp of her
conversion. It is titled “The Philosopher’s Defence of Morality.” Gathering
essays in the mid-1970s for her first published collection, Foot omitted
almost nothing. But she did omit “The Philosopher’s Defence.” It is not hard
to see why. The article stands on the other side of a chasm from the work she
began to do after she finally read Wittgenstein.
“Defence” is a strange piece. It shows none of the tendencies for which
Foot would later be known: loving attention to subtleties and nuances of
language, engagement with the richly descriptive pre-modern vocabulary of
virtues and vices—even (or especially) an insistence on the objectivity of
ethics. In “Defence,” Foot argues that philosophers who attack
“subjectivism” are mostly troubling themselves over nothing. She insists that
what she calls “the logical thesis”—that “ethical terms are not property
terms,” that there is nothing for ethical judgments to get right—does not imply
that we should not take our ethical judgments seriously. “Why not both?” she
asks. She sounds much like Hare, whose The Language of Morals came out
the same year. In his book, Hare argued that “in the end everything rests upon
. . . a decision of principle. [A person] has to decide whether to accept
[some proposed] way of life or not . . . if he does not accept it, then let him

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accept some other, and try to live by it.”33 In 1952, Foot seemed to agree.
Why not let everything rest on subjective commitment?
Between 1952 and 1954, though, Foot’s views began to evolve. In Trinity
term 1954, Foot, Murdoch, and Basil Mitchell offered a graduate class,
“Analysis in Moral Philosophy.” Bernard Williams recalled this as the first
place he encountered the ideas about rudeness that Foot and her friends had
been discussing since the late 1940s and that would figure centrally in Foot’s
first influential article, “Moral Arguments,” three years later. Later in 1954,
at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association,
Foot contributed to a symposium titled, “When is a Principle a Moral
Principle?” Her contribution fell into two parts. In the first, she criticized
Hare’s analyses of moral judgment as abstract and artificial: “some of our
philosophical problems,” she wrote, “arise because we keep before our eyes
something general instead of something specific.”34 Hare had argued that all
moral judgments take the form of a universalized prescription: “always do
X” or “never do Y.” Foot suggested that people’s deepest commitments take
all sorts of forms. It is a Wittgensteinian thought. (Wittgenstein considered as
an epigraph to his Investigations Kent’s line from King Lear: “I’ll teach you
differences!”) In the second part of her symposium contribution, Foot
broached another central theme of her upcoming work: the idea that not just
anything could count as a moral principle, even if it were a universalized
prescription—that moral principles presuppose “a certain background.”35
She was only a few steps from the positions that would make her reputation
and reorient her career.
Foot became a philosopher because of MacKinnon. He introduced her to
Kant. And he transmitted to her his sense of the seriousness of philosophical
inquiry. That same sense bound Foot and Anscombe together. But Foot’s
apprenticeship with Anscombe drew something out of her that Ryle and
others had not seen coming. Anscombe provoked Foot to make “a new sort of
philosophical move.”

HEDGEHOGS IN THE LIGHT OF THE MOON

In the 1950s, fellows of Somerville College were entitled to one term off
from College responsibilities (with pay) after five years’ service. After
bringing her Greek up to par, Foot became a tutorial fellow of Somerville in
1950—Somerville’s first ever fellow in philosophy. So she was eligible for

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leave by 1955. No one could take a leave, though, without first laying the
groundwork for others to assume her usual responsibilities. Foot broached
the subject with Anscombe by 1956, and finally took her sabbatical in
1957.36
That sabbatical was a catalyst for Anscombe and Foot, both. We have
already seen how Anscombe’s preparations to take over ethics tutorials
prompted and informed her attack on Oxford moral philosophy. Just as
consequential, though, was a quiet, private remark Anscombe made to Foot
during her leave. Their whole history together had prepared Foot for the
moment. Anscombe never told Foot to read Wittgenstein, but once she read
him, she thought: why didn’t you tell me sooner? So when Anscombe said to
Foot in the autumn of 1957, “I think you ought to read Aquinas,” Foot
immediately went to work.37
♦♦♦♦
Anscombe had studied Aquinas closely since her teenage years and looked to
him for instruction on any and every topic. Her doctoral thesis was originally
meant to be on Aquinas. She concluded over time, though, that referencing
Aquinas made people “silly.” Some Catholics were uncritically deferential
to Aquinas as a Doctor of the Church. Citing Aquinas made these people stop
thinking—an offense against philosophy. Some non-Catholics on the other
hand, like Bertrand Russell in his A History of Western Philosophy, were
ignorantly dismissive of Aquinas, so allergic to theology in general or
Catholicism in particular that they were incapable of consciously learning
from a medieval Catholic theologian. Anscombe generally chose, then, to
absorb and rearticulate Aquinas’s insights without mentioning him by name.38
In the Truman pamphlet, she alludes to the Western tradition of reflection on
the ethics of war. She does not mention Aquinas—though he is the most
important figure in that tradition, and the originator of the distinction
Anscombe invokes between intended and merely foreseen outcomes. And she
says nothing about Aquinas in “Modern Moral Philosophy” either, choosing
instead to direct her contemporaries to Aristotle—whom all Greats students
read. By 1957, though, Anscombe knew Foot well enough to know that she
could trust Foot not to be silly. And she knew that Aquinas was a richer
source for reimagining ethics than Aristotle himself.39
Aquinas’s magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae, is divided into three
parts (encompassing five thick volumes in the most popular English

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translation). At Anscombe’s recommendation, Foot turned particularly to the
Secunda Secundae—the second part of the second part of the Summa. In the
Secunda Secundae, Aquinas creates a taxonomy of virtues and vices much
more intricate and expansive than Aristotle’s. Aquinas starts from the four
“cardinal” virtues acknowledged by the whole Greek tradition back to Plato:
practical wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. Under each of these,
though, he identifies a cluster of subordinate virtues, all related to the central,
cardinal virtue in question. For example, Aquinas links leniency in
punishment to moderation about food, drink, and sex. Both leniency and this
more familiar sort of moderation, he thinks, involve a similar capacity to say
“no” to potentially destructive impulses.
Those are just the virtues. Under each of the virtues—the subordinate as
well as the cardinal ones—Aquinas identifies various bad tendencies people
can develop (vices) that stop them from developing the good one. There was
a pragmatic—indeed, professional—reason for Aquinas to go into so much
more detail. The mission of the Dominican order, to which Aquinas
belonged, included listening to confessions. One sees in the Secunda
Secundae a finely textured, carefully elaborated sense of the myriad ways a
human life can go right or go wrong—exactly what a friar would need to help
penitents think about how to amend their lives. It is exactly the kind of ethics,
too, that a newly converted Wittgensteinian would love—full of differences!
What Aquinas taught Foot was how ethics could be a matter of objective
truths: the result she had been seeking since 1945. In the Secunda Secundae,
each virtue is praised because of how it helps rational, social animals like us
succeed in a wide range of our characteristic activities. Each vice is
condemned because of how it impedes or thwarts us. Human beings need
courage because our individual and collective activities sometimes involve
danger. Cowardice is a problem because of how it prevents us from standing
up for ourselves and our loved ones, and from pursuing our goals. The
example that brought this home to Foot, and most delighted her, was
“loquaciousness”:
it struck me that there were always good reasons for saying of something that it was a virtue or a
vice. . . . [So] [t]here must be a reason why this is a vice, if indeed it is a vice. I put this question to
a pupil of mine: “Why on earth should loquacity be a vice?” And she said, “well if one is always
talking, one doesn’t have time to think.” I was very interested in this, which wasn’t Aquinas’s
reason but seemed to me to be right.40

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Reading Aquinas, Foot finally knew what she wanted to say: not only to Ayer
and Hare, but also to Nietzsche, with his jaded skepticism about all late-
modern talk of “good” and “evil.” One could summarize Foot’s new position
thus: Hare can’t reply to Nietzsche; Aquinas can. If Nietzsche were to ask
Hare, “why should I issue any ‘universal prescriptions’? Why do they matter
so much?”, Hare would have to admit that there is no objective answer.
People can offer subjective answers, reflecting their personal decisions of
principle. But any objective answer would conflict with the billiard-ball
picture. On that picture, nothing matters objectively.* But just as Foot had
been freed to say “what? what?” about the dichotomy between facts and
values, she had been freed to ask why we have to go on accepting the
billiard-ball picture, instead of the older one discernible in the thought of
Aristotle and Aquinas. As Foot concluded a BBC broadcast in 1957: “We
should be able to turn to the analytic moral philosopher for an account of the
basis of the different kinds of virtues and vices, for their necessary connexion
with human harm and good. This is just the sort of work that he should be
able to do: but usually we are fobbed off with talk about the favorable
attitude which anyone who calls anything a virtue must take up—as if this
was enough.”41 Foot delivered a talk about this to the Philosophical Society
at Oxford. Then she published a pair of papers: “Moral Arguments” and
“Moral Beliefs.” They turned her, overnight, into Hare’s foremost opponent.
The papers don’t feel revolutionary. They are intelligent, funny,
painstaking, but limited. Unlike Murdoch’s early work, they are not—on the
surface—about big, contending pictures of reality. Like most 1950s Oxford
philosophy, they are about language. But this is what made them important.
Hare claimed to have analyzed “the language of morals.” Foot objected to his
linguistic analysis. It was the only way to dislodge his view.
Foot asks, first, about the word “rude.” “Rude,” like “good” or “bad,”
“right” or “wrong,” is plainly an evaluative word. Yet there are factual
criteria governing its use. We do not have to—we do not get to—decide in
anguished freedom what behaviors count as rude. Rather, to say that some
behavior is rude means that it offends by showing disrespect. But suppose
someone argues that there is an unbridgeable logical chasm between “is” and
“is rude” (like the alleged chasm between “is” and “ought”) so that any sort
of behavior might be “thought rude,” without explanation. Foot contends that
a person making this argument has lost his grip on the concept of rudeness. If
the factual criteria of rudeness are set aside, there is nothing left of the

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concept. If someone were to say “ ‘a man is rude when he walks slowly up to
a front door’, and . . . not because he believes that such behavior causes
offence . . . [i]t is evident that with the usual criteria of rudeness he leaves
behind the concept itself.”42
In her second article, Foot presses closer to ethics. She turns to the word
(and concept) “dangerous”:
There may seem to be a “warning function” connected with the word “dangerous” as there is
supposed to be a “commending function” connected with the word “good.” [But] suppose that
philosophers, puzzled about the property of dangerousness, decided that the word . . . was
essentially a practical or action-guiding term, used for warning . . . and this meant that anyone
using it . . . committed himself to avoiding the things he called dangerous, to preventing other
people from going near them, and perhaps to running in the opposite direction.43

This would be analogous to what Hare and others said about moral terms.
Such terms, they maintained, express no facts—only attitudes or (at most)
prescriptions. But this is “nonsense,” Foot says: “It is logically impossible to
warn about anything not thought of as threatening evil, and for danger we
need a particular kind of serious evil such as injury or death.”44 It makes no
sense to “warn” of the “danger” of stepping outside if what one means is that
it is a mild day with a light breeze. To insist that this makes sense is not
linguistic analysis; it is dogma put forward as analysis.
Finally, Foot closes the loop. What about “good” and “bad,” “right” and
“wrong,” as applied to human character and behavior? Are these judgments,
too, “logically vulnerable to facts”? Or could any use of these words—so
long as it’s consistent—make sense? Consider, she asks: could we
understand someone who says that someone is a good man “because he
clasped and unclasped his hands” or refuses to “run round trees left handed,
or look at hedgehogs in the light of the moon”?45 Setting aside special
explanations that would connect these strange behaviors with recognizable
human concerns (like the man’s being very ill, so that even clasping and
unclasping his hands was progress and showed his determination to
recover): the answer is, no. We cannot strip away recognizable human
concerns altogether—brush aside the skeptical question, “what’s the
point?”—and still use the word “good” in an intelligible way. Several times
in her article, Foot repeats a refrain: “just try.” Just try, that is, to assess
people’s characters and behavior without tethering these assessments to
natural human concerns—thus leaving them vulnerable to facts. Just try to

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talk about ethics while leaving behind considerations of what makes human
lives go well or badly—the foundations on which Aristotle and Aquinas built
their whole theories. It can’t be done.
♦♦♦♦
The impact of Foot’s articles was immediate. Hare remained the preeminent
moral philosopher in Oxford; his book remained the one that philosophy
students read in preparation for their exams. A few years later, he was named
the White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. But the debate now turned to
Foot’s criticisms. For the next decade, students (who love seeing their
teachers argue) attended the lectures and seminars of each, trying out the
objections of the other.46 In time, Foot wearied of it. She remarked to
Rosalind Hursthouse one day, “I’ve got to go have another of those ding-dong
battles with Dick.”47 But she had done what Murdoch and Anscombe could
not. She had put their shared critique—the possibility of an alternative to
subjectivist ethics—onto the official agenda.
Foot thereby achieved something at once vital and gently ironic. In
carrying forward Anscombe’s attack on Oxford moral philosophy, Foot
became: an Oxford moral philosopher. It was Foot, not Murdoch or
Anscombe, whom Hare approached in 1958, with the idea of teaching a
course together the following year. And in the light tone and precision of her
breakthrough articles, Foot resembled no one so much as J.L. Austin. Austin,
recall, was known for his wit, his love of detail and nuance. “That man
would find a difference between ‘enough’ and ‘sufficient’,” Anscombe once
complained.48 But there was more than a resemblance between Austin’s
criticisms of Ayer and Foot’s criticisms of Hare. Foot, like Austin, was
“hounding down the minutiae,” attending to the subtleties of language, while
Hare insisted on a grand, unified theory: the language of morals. As Foot
remarked in her BBC talk: “Those who accuse the present-day philosophers
of fiddling their time away may be surprised at the suggestion that what we
need is therefore more detail, and more attention to the meaning of moral
terms. But this may well be the case.”49
Hare and Foot had, in a way, changed places. Hare had never been any
more at home in Austin’s Kindergarten than he had in Basil Mitchell’s group
of religiously serious outsiders, The Metaphysicals. Hare’s metaphysical
perspective—after the war—was essentially that of his contemporaries; so
he wasn’t willing to join Murdoch and others in alienated opposition. But he

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was also deadly earnest, in a way that most of his colleagues were not. He
did not hate their frivolity, as Anscombe did. But neither did he share it. And
his pained sternness set him apart. One term, Austin’s Saturday morning
group was discussing moral problems. Austin asked the group how they
would respond if someone offered them a bribe. Hare spoke up: “I would say
I have a principle against taking bribes.” Austin remarked, “really? I’d just
say, ‘no, thank you.’ ”50 Whatever Hare thought of Anscombe’s character, he
had more in common with her and her friends than he did with Austin, at least
in his attitude toward philosophy.
But Foot had the light touch Hare lacked. She was serious, but she was
also clever—a term of high praise in 1950s Oxford.* And no one could be
more graceful, more au courant even in rebellion. Warnock recalled the
delight with which Foot’s papers were received at the Philosophical Society
—without much regard to their merits. Their colleagues weren’t invested
either in the fact–value dichotomy or in its denial. Warnock said, “most of us
. . . saw it simply as an elegant and enjoyable bit of Hare-bashing.”51 It did
not help that Hare took criticism so badly, seldom budging in response. Hare
engaged with Foot only in hopes that his own views might once more prevail
—the views on which he had staked himself.

“OR ELSE I HAVE TO RESIGN”

In a late interview, Foot said of Anscombe, “I learnt everything from her.”52

But Foot did something vital for Anscombe, too: she was her friend.
It could have been otherwise.
As Foot remarked to many people, she and Anscombe were worlds apart,
religiously. She routinely described herself as “a card-carrying atheist.”
MacKinnon had not converted her, though he came as close as anyone, it
seems. She asked him once, in the 1940s, whether he thought she needed to
become a Christian. For whatever reason—perceiving her unwillingness?—
he replied, “no; it’s not necessary.”53 It grieved Anscombe, though, that she
lacked arguments that could bring her friend to faith. She wrote to Foot in the
early 1960s, asking why she was an atheist. Foot barely engaged: “my
thoughts are entirely conventional,” she wrote. “I mean just what most
atheists are inclined to think: ‘how queer it all is, this theology, and what a
strain.’ ”54 Several friends noted how closed Foot was on spiritual matters.

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Foot remarked to Peter Conradi once that, whereas Murdoch had a spiritual
life, she had a moral life. When Conradi asked her to say more, though, she
showed “a semi-deliberate, semi-obstinate unwillingness to explore what
she herself might mean.”55
Despite this fundamental difference, Foot was Anscombe’s friend—and
the most important kind of friend Anscombe could have had in Oxford.
However exhausted Foot routinely was, and however much she shared
Anscombe’s sense of standing against the world, no one fitted into Oxford
society more easily. Foot belonged—effortlessly—wherever she went.
Imagine Anscombe without Foot: with her suspect beliefs, her coarse and
cantankerous self-presentation, her seven children helping raise one another
under the disapproving stares of the St. John Street neighbors. Or simply
consider how Anscombe appeared to the eyes of conventional prejudice:
trousered and sandaled, wall-eyed and chain-smoking. Murdoch recorded in
her journal a story Anscombe told her about being arrested by the Oxford
police one night “for wandering about with her hair down”; she refused to
give her name.56 But Foot venerated Anscombe, and everyone admired Foot.
Foot quietly did something else for Anscombe, too—though she also did it
for her own sake. She secured Anscombe’s position at Somerville.
As 1957 turned to 1958, Anscombe was coming to the end of her
Rockefeller Foundation support and beginning to explore options beyond
Somerville. Somerville certainly didn’t have the money to pay full salaries to
two philosophers. There were no promising openings elsewhere in Oxford,
though; anyway, no other college would hire Anscombe as a tutorial fellow.
She had just published her first book, and would soon start to receive
invitations to come teach in the United States. But at the end of 1957, those
invitations were still several years away. What was to become of her,
meanwhile? The likeliest thing seemed that she would pick up excess pupils
here and there, from various colleges, but would have a proper home in none
of them.
Foot perceived all of this. In November 1957, she wrote to Janet Vaughan,
To my mind she is the best all round philosopher in the University . . . . I doubt if there is anyone
better in the country . . . . There has never been a woman who could do philosophy as she can. . .
. Now Somerville is obviously the place for her; the place where she would be happiest . . . . This
seems to lead to only one conclusion; either we manage to split the job, or else I have to resign.57

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She added “But I don’t want to resign; I’ve never wanted to resign less than
at the moment when I think I’ve got onto a fruitful line in moral philosophy.”
Foot proposed that she and Anscombe split the available pupils 50/50, and
that most of the money go to Anscombe, without telling Anscombe or anyone
else about the arrangement. Foot preempted the suggestion that this would
pinch her and Michael: “Michael and I are not at all badly off. He earns just
about as much as I do at the moment, and . . . we have no reason for having to
live in any style.” Foot reminded Vaughan of something Vaughan herself had
once said: “no one is forced to take their salary.”
Vaughan shared Foot’s ambitions for the College. She needed little
convincing to retain both her master teacher and perhaps the best philosopher
in the country, at no added expense. The thing was done.
Foot passed 12 happy months, publishing some of her most important
work, beginning to dream of a book, helping oversee Oxfam, talking every
afternoon with Anscombe.
♦♦♦♦
In late March 1959, Michael walked out. Philippa did not see it coming. She
and Hare were scheduled to begin their class together in a few weeks. The
lecture lists had just appeared. She wrote, “Dear Dick, I am so sorry but I am
no use for next term. I don’t want any commitments, don’t even know where I
shall be. . . . you will soon enough hear why & understand.”58
In his memoir, years later, Michael said bluntly what he was thinking when
he left: “I [was] passionately interested in having children; she turned out not
to be able to have any.”59 Philippa was 38. Michael moved to London to be
with his secretary, whom he married the following year. Philippa allowed
herself some bitterness, remarking to a colleague that Michael had “run off
with a bit of fluff.”*,60 Mostly, she was shattered.
Foot’s friends sprang into action. She was invited to extra meals at 27 St.
John Street, children clambering into her lap as usual. Her oldest friend and
colleague, Anne Cobbe, insisted that Foot come live with her, a few doors
down from where they’d roomed together as undergraduates. And Murdoch
reached out as soon as she heard the news. She and Foot had fallen out of
touch as Foot had attached herself to Anscombe. Murdoch wrote to her friend
for the first time since 1948:

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 I have just heard the news about M. It may be tactless and untimely to write to you, but I feel I
must and at once. I simply wanted to send you all my old love. It’s been a long time in store, but I
think it’s scarcely diminished, and that you knew then, and know now how much it is. My dear
dear darling, I kiss you with very much love and all hopes for your absolute welfare. Ever I.61

Foot had never understood Murdoch’s paralyzing sense of estrangement, but

was never more grateful, either, for her self-doubting, effusive friend. They
quickly arranged to meet. Murdoch wrote to her afterward:
I am still rather speechless after yesterday. It is strange and overwhelming so to recover a whole
area of one’s being which one thought was lost. But I still feel exceedingly shy & tentative where
you are concerned. . . . I deeply hope that life is recovering in you, & each day is less sad; hard to
speak of this too. Oh dear—just loving you very much indeed. I62

She then drew a picture of a woman walking a shaggy dog with a furiously
wagging tail. The dog’s tag reads “HAPPINESS.”
But much of the experience of grief cannot be shared. Foot had lost her
partner. How did it color her sense of loss that she too had wanted children
—and that the person with whom she had shared that longing and that
disappointment had abandoned her? Indeed, had abandoned her because of
that disappointment? That July, in her journal, Foot wrote of the experience
of returning to 16 Park Town: “In the big room physical desolation & neglect;
a sense of the closeness of the old life, as if we had just moved the books
from the shelves, & could put them back.”63 Foot taught that fall, but
requested unpaid leave for the following spring.
A string had been cut. Foot was no longer tethered to Oxford. And like
Anscombe, she had now done enough that invitations started to arrive from
the United States. Foot taught at Cornell in 1961 and at MIT in 1964. As
deeply as she loved Somerville, she felt more and more impatience with the
tutorial and administrative burdens there. In 1969, when Anscombe was
offered Wittgenstein’s chair at Cambridge, Foot resigned, too.
♦♦♦♦
Coincidentally or not, around 1960 Foot began another philosophical
metamorphosis. In “Moral Beliefs,” she had recommended a return to the
conceptual vocabulary of virtue and vice, with its “internal connections” to
natural human concerns. But even in that paper, she noted that there are times
when the characteristic behaviors of virtuous people work against them,
putting them in harm’s way. A first responder jumping onto a subway track to

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rescue a man who has fallen, a prosecutor in a corrupt regime, arraigning a
drug lord: these people risk death, risk leaving their families bereft.
In “Moral Beliefs,” Foot appealed to the general tendency of virtues like
courage and justice to benefit their possessors. She highlighted, too, the
difficulty of being selectively just or brave:
It is perfectly true that if a man is just it follows that he will be prepared, in the event of very evil
circumstances, even to face death rather than to act unjustly . . . . For him it turns out that his
justice brings disaster on him, and yet like anyone else he had good reason to be a just and not an
unjust man.64

After 1960, Foot became dissatisfied with this response. Mightn’t there be
whole contexts—like Nazi-occupied Europe—in which virtue didn’t pay?
And while it might be difficult to be selectively virtuous, wouldn’t it be
more rational, if one could somehow pull it off? Or suppose someone
rejected the standard of virtue altogether? Was that person necessarily
making a mistake? Foot called this problem “the tight corner.”
By 1972, in “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” Foot had
concluded that her earlier view—the Aristotle/Aquinas view—was
propaganda, and might even provoke cynicism: “It is often felt,” she wrote,
“that there is an element of deception in the official line about morality.”65
Better, she thought, for those who would defend virtue to think of themselves
like the citizens of besieged Leningrad, who could not know they would
prosper by standing together but who were determined to stand together
anyway.
There was something ironic about this turn in Foot’s thought. It was not a
total rejection of her earlier work. She stood by her technical criticisms of
Hare’s theory. The subject-matter of ethics, she still insisted, was human
good and harm. But she had seemingly come around to the very view she and
her friends had hoped to counter: that ethical commitments are voluntary acts
of self-definition. Unhappy with her conclusion but seeing no way around it,
Foot turned for many years away from general questions in moral philosophy.
She wrote about abortion and devised the first of the “runaway trolley”
thought-experiments that have become a ubiquitous cultural reference.66 She
wrote about euthanasia and Nietzsche. She was as personally and
intellectually unsettled as the 1960s culture swirling around her, a culture that
was beginning to turn against the perceived elitism and detachment of the
Oxbridge world.

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 Meanwhile, her old university friend Mary (Scrutton) Midgley had
returned to philosophy after more than a decade, up in what Oxonians
considered the hinterlands of the philosophical world: Newcastle. Midgley
had never gone in for Oxford linguistic philosophy—though she admired
Foot’s interventions in that milieu. She had been raising her boys and reading
everything but philosophy. But an idea was gathering inside her, one that
spoke directly to the difficulties in which her friend now found herself.

* “If you must,” A.J. Ayer said to Christopher Coope, who had heard Anscombe on the radio arguing
with Glanville Williams, and wanted to study with her. Coope, correspondence with the author,
January 4, 2013.
* Like “cabinet,” “Senior Common Room” names both a place and, metonymically, the group with
privileged access to that place—the fellows of a college.
* A widely attested anecdote about Gilbert Ryle exhibits a similar attitude: he was once asked whether
he ever read novels. To which he replied, “Oh, yes. All six, every year”—meaning the novels of
Jane Austen.
* Hare wrote an affecting essay about this, titled “Nothing Matters.” In it, he relates how a young
houseguest from Switzerland fell into despondency after reading Camus’s The Stranger.
“Nothing matters,” the young man said. Hare’s response is revealing: he told his guest that the
only way anything ever matters is by mattering to somebody. So if something mattered to his
guest—if he cared about anything—then that thing mattered in the only way it ever could:
subjectively. To think that something could matter objectively is a confusion. See R.M. Hare,
“Nothing Matters,” in Applications of Moral Philosophy (London: Palgrave, 1972),
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00955-8_4.
* Cleverness, in the mid-century Oxford imagination, was a debater’s virtue. It encompassed facility
with concepts, dialectical skill, and wit. Recall Williams’ remark about Anscombe: “she
impressed upon [me] that being clever wasn’t enough.”
* On another occasion, in another mood, she mused bleakly to the same colleague, “so many of us
were barren.”

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 Chapter 8

Slipping Out Over the Wall

A DAY IN THE LIFE (II)

3 Lyndhurst Gardens, Jesmond, greater Newcastle upon Tyne, Summer 1959.

Mary and Geoff Midgley’s youngest was down for his afternoon nap and the
older boys were playing contentedly downstairs. The adults were glad to
have an hour to themselves. Mary sat down to write. Before curling up with a
book, Geoff switched on one of the radio receivers he’d placed throughout
the house, tuning in to the transmitter in the kitchen. Happy voices. Mary and
Geoff became absorbed in their work. Then: a sound of breaking glass. They
looked at one another. Nothing for a moment. Now a seven-and-a-half-year-
old voice, with the accent of a child who has listened to hours on hours of
BBC English: “Ooh, you’ve broken it! Do it again!” And a six-year-old
voice, answering: “Yes, I think I will!” Another crash. Mary and Geoff got up
and went downstairs. Two large panes were missing from the window that
looked out onto the back yard. Most of a set of building blocks was strewn
on the floor. Their middle son clutched one block—an arch-shaped one—like
a hammer. The boys looked up at their parents anxiously, like dogs that have
messed on the rug.1
Mary and Geoff were both untidy people, and the Midgley home was
typically in a state of barely controlled chaos. “Academic squalor,” as one
visitor described it. Two months before her wedding, Mary Scrutton wrote to
Anna Kallin, her producer at the BBC; she said she thought her new name,
Midgley, should be an adverb. Was this what it meant to live “midgley”?
Geoff’s radio projects—an outgrowth of his wartime service with the RAF
—colonized the main living space until Mary insisted that they be relegated
to a definite corner of the house.2 By 1959, he had moved on to early
computers. One of the boys woke from sleep one night and, wandering down

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the hall, came upon his father, entwined like Laocoön in programming tape,
carefully punching holes as he held the tape up to the light.* Mary wasn’t so
different. She had tried the patience of her teachers as a child:
If I reached where I was meant to be at all, I was late, without my books, covered in ink, and
devoid of hair-ribbons. . . . Shoe-laces broke as soon as they realised they were on me, and I
replaced them with bits of string, which came undone and tripped me up. One way or another, at
the sight of me, right-thinking people always, at once, began to prepare a lecture.3

She was the same Mary at 39. And now there were three boys on the scene.
If there were a lot of things in the Midgley home—soft piles of
multicolored computer tape and stray parts from disemboweled radios, stick
insects from the local natural history museum and homemade stuffed animals
like Wellington the Whale, recorders and oboes and associated paraphernalia
—there was also lavish attention. Like Lesley and Tom Scrutton, Mary and
Geoff welcomed their children to join in adult conversation as soon as they
were able: about politics, about literature, about the foundations of logic,
about what they’d heard on the BBC Third Programme the evening before.
The boys were imitating broadcasting English. Mary wrote to Anna Kallin in
the spring of 1955 that her older two were “both rather 3rd Prog. these days,
& totter around saying ‘Astonishing’ & ‘Fascinating’.”4
During the day, unless she was joining Geoff and his colleagues for lunch
or raiding the biology section of the library, Mary was home with whichever
boys weren’t in school. They played word games, card games, and games
like “heads, bodies, legs.” One of them would draw a head on a piece of
paper, then fold the paper to hide his work and pass it to the next person, who
had to add a torso, and so on. They sat down together in the front room by the
old coal fire (it was Newcastle) and read the Moomins books and others that
showed up twice a year in great boxes. Mary reviewed children’s literature
for The New Statesman and Nation. Once, when the whole family was
feeling terribly cooped up after a shared illness, Mary took the boys out into
the back garden with a box of old china; they smashed it, piece by piece. She
understood the deep, instinctual satisfaction of breaking things.
Especially during the school year, afternoons often included a stretch in
which Mary could press ahead with the novel she was writing. She loved
being with her sons, but the way she retained a wider sense of self was by
cultivating side projects: writing, attending anti-racism and anti-war
demonstrations, sewing “gonks” for the toy department at the local

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Fenwick’s. If she had to sacrifice something, it was always sleep. Small
wonder that her novel (never published) was a work of speculative fiction
about hibernation.
She was no Cordon Bleu chef, but Mary was skillful enough at producing
standard, middle-class English cuisine: meat, two veg, and a pudding,
nightly. She particularly liked improvising, though: making stews or rice
dishes out of whatever lay to hand. As she prepped what one of her boys in a
spirit of youthful rebellion called “burning house potatoes,” Mary would
look out into the back yard. Outside, the boys liked to clamber over the old
Anderson air-raid shelter—the eldest taking charge—or watch the passenger
trains roll to and from the North Sea coast.
Mary wasn’t good for much after the boys’ bedtime—certainly not for
anything that felt like work—but if she had a free hour in the evening, she
might turn to one of the books she had checked out of the library. After
discovering ethology—the study of animal behavior—in 1952, she had begun
working through everything in the King’s College collection: the works of
field researchers like Tinbergen, those of evolutionary theorists like
Dobzhansky, and everything the library had on “ants, red deer, lemmings,
baboons or whatever.”5 She was fascinated with the animals themselves; she
had loved watching and thinking about other creatures since childhood. But
she had also begun asking herself what this body of anecdotes, field studies,
and theories might have to say about the human animal—particularly in light
of the work of her friends Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch. And though she
was not keeping up with philosophy in general, and she was living in what
Oxbridge people thought of as an intellectual backwater, her life was feeding
into her emerging reflections in unexpected ways. For she had “animal
behaviour going on all around” her: “upstairs, in the garden . . . on the
hearthrug.”6

LATENCY

Until the past few years, it was easy to forget—or miss entirely—the link
between Mary Midgley and her university friends. In his popular 2014 book
about Foot’s famous thought-experiment—in which a driver can throw a
switch and steer a runaway tram from a track where it will probably kill
multiple people onto a track where it will probably kill just one—David
Edmonds includes a chapter on “the founding mothers”: by which he means

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Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch.7 Murdoch’s philosophical writings (unlike
Foot’s and Anscombe’s) have little or no bearing on “trolleyology,” but the
connections among the three women were too interesting for Edmonds to
ignore. But while Edmonds interviewed Midgley, he did not mention her in
the text.
There are several reasons why Midgley hasn’t registered as part of a
group with the others, starting with the unusual shape of her career. Midgley
was on the same trajectory as her friends—undergraduate degree, war work,
graduate studies, first academic job—until 1950, when she resigned her post
at the University of Reading, married, and followed her husband to
Newcastle. She never ceased being a philosopher—and never ceased
thinking of herself as one. In 1956, she was billed for one of her many BBC
talks as “a writer and lecturer in philosophy.”8 But by 1951, Midgley had
stepped away from the world of professional philosophy, as Murdoch would
do a dozen years later.
Midgley remained an active cultural critic through the mid-1950s,
broadcasting regularly on the BBC and writing reviews and thought pieces
for major literary and cultural magazines. By that time, she had already begun
to work unsystematically but steadily on the project that would occupy her
for the rest of her life: understanding the continuities between human beings
and the rest of the natural world. But it would be another 15–20 years before
she would be ready to publish about it. She can thus seem like a writer of a
different generation.
Consider: by 1960, Anscombe had not only said her piece about Oxford
moral philosophy but had also published both of her monographs. Foot had
established herself as Hare’s preeminent critic, and Murdoch was already
turning away from philosophy and toward fiction; but the first of Midgley’s
16 books was 18 years away. It is easy, then, to miss the generational tie
between Midgley and her friends.
Midgley’s work has also not had the same impact in professional
philosophical circles as that of her friends—though she is better known
outside the academy than either Anscombe or Foot. Midgley was a
deliberately multidisciplinary thinker. Early on—it is hard to say exactly
when or how—she became convinced that moral philosophers must relate
various bodies of knowledge to one another if they are to achieve an
adequate understanding of human life, human motivation, and human success
or failure. This unconfined tendency aligned Midgley more with Murdoch

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than with Anscombe and Foot, even during their postgraduate years. In a
journal entry from 1948, Murdoch exults, “I talk philosophy with E. & P. &
psychology with Mary!”9
There was precedent for the sort of integrative work Midgley wanted to do
—and she knew it. This is how Aristotle approaches ethics: as a biologist
studying an animal of particularly absorbing interest. Aristotle’s “works” are
widely thought to be student notes on the lectures he delivered at the Lyceum.
His Nicomachean Ethics lectures pick up directly from his lectures On the
Soul—the psyche—and continue from there to his lectures on Politics.
Everything is connected to everything else, and biology and psychology and
ethics and politics have to be considered in relation to one another. But this
kind of integrative approach had become rare.
Relatedly, Midgley always shaped her writing with reference to an
audience broader than any one disciplinary guild. “Because so many
disciplines border [my] topic,” she wrote in her breakthrough book, Beast
and Man, “it must necessarily be discussed in plain language.”10 She would
later liken philosophy to plumbing.11 It is the unpretentious business of
working out kinks and blockages in people’s houses of thought. But again:
plainness of purpose and speech does not always command respect. Nor do
plumbers.
It was the integrative, multidisciplinary character of Midgley’s work that
made it important, though. Her friends’ work was chiefly critical. Essays like
Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” and Foot’s “Moral Beliefs”—even
many of Murdoch’s philosophical writings—were attacks on a dominant way
of conceiving ethics; at most, they gestured toward what might take its place.
This is understandable, considering that the views they promoted were
minority ones, unlikely to receive a hearing unless dominant, opposing views
were not first undermined. It was also the predictable result of working
within the genres of the professional society talk or the journal article. These
genres are best suited to targeted attacks or incremental refinements, not the
elaboration of large, visionary proposals.
Midgley, writing from the margins of the discipline, was the first to
present a positive proposal for the kind of moral philosophy recommended
but never developed by Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch: a naturalistic moral
philosophy, grounded in the character and needs of the human animal.12
Indeed, she was the only one who could, the only one who knew both enough
biology and enough moral philosophy to relate the two fields.

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 But philosophers have sometimes dismissed Midgley’s work as
insufficiently professional. Even old friends.

FROM OXFORD TO NEWCASTLE

Mary Scrutton and Geoffrey Midgley were engaged in the summer of 1950.
They had met in the late 1940s. After completing his undergraduate degree in
PPE, Geoff went on to the B.Phil., while Mary began her doctoral thesis.
They attended the same graduate classes and talks, and sometimes found
themselves in the same informal gatherings. Geoff recalled when he first
noticed Mary. A mutual friend, Ann Martin, brought Geoff round to Mary’s
tiny flat, and the three of them talked from 11 to 5. Sometime in the middle of
the afternoon, Mary slipped away to heat up spaghetti, which impressed
Geoff more than it probably should have.
Conversations like these—with Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch, with
Geoff and Ann—were increasingly the point of being at Oxford for Mary.
The more formal discussions that took place at the Jowett and Philosophical
Societies were beginning to alienate her as much as they alienated Anscombe
and Murdoch. One meeting of the Jowett stood out to her as emblematic:
a disciple of . . . Austin’s read a paper on a very small point of linguistic usage. Small though it was
. . . that point hardly came up . . . in the subsequent discussion. As soon as the speaker had
finished, his critics piled in to attack him—not on this supposedly main issue but on a crowd of even
smaller linguistic points arising in the course of his argument, places where they thought his
wording was mistaken. The game went on for the whole evening and obviously could have gone on
forever.13

Mary walked away depressed. Was this what philosophy had become? If so,
did she want any part of it? She was starting to have doubts, too, about her
thesis, though she would keep working on it for another several years. She
continued to be fascinated with her subject, Plotinus. But her advisor, Eric
Dodds, was distant; she was starting to see the scope of her proposed project
as unmanageable, and anyway she didn’t need the D.Phil. to get a job. A
generation-long expansion in British post-secondary education had begun,
and there were “jobs for old rope.”14
Foot tipped off Mary to the position at Reading in 1949, as she had tipped
off Murdoch to the position at St. Anne’s the year before. Mary applied, was
offered the job, and took it. She might have made a career in Reading,

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succeeding the old Hegel scholar who hired her. She loved her colleagues in
English and Classics, including distinguished literary critic Frank Kermode.
They met regularly for lunch. But when she and Geoff both returned to
Oxford for the summer of 1950, they fell in love and quickly decided to
marry. He too was a year into his first appointment.
They thus faced a dilemma. Mary’s chair at Reading had been thinking
about bringing on a second lecturer and was willing to hire Geoff
straightaway. But Geoff’s chair at King’s College, Newcastle, anticipated
that he, too, would eventually have work for two Midgleys. But that wasn’t
certain, and it wasn’t right away. Which direction should they go: southeast
for the sure thing or (much further) north? Three considerations favored
Newcastle. First, Mary’s chair wasn’t just a Hegel scholar. He was hostile to
all schools of thought other than Hegelianism, while Geoff’s chair had
eclectic interests, both in a variety of often obscure older figures and in more
recent ones. Then too, Mary and Geoff wanted children, and Mary wanted to
be home when they were small, so the prospect of a delayed dual
appointment was more appealing than an immediate one. Finally, Newcastle
paid better. Indeed, it looked to Mary and Geoff as if salaries increased, the
further one worked from the center of the philosophical universe at Oxford.
Mary’s lectureship at Reading paid £400 a year, while Geoff’s at Newcastle
paid £550. (Anthony Flew got £800 a year when he was hired at
Aberdeen!)15 It made them wonder what people were actually paid at
Oxford.
So Mary resigned her appointment effective December 1950 (after Foot
helped her find a replacement), and she and Geoff were married on the 18th
in a blinding snowstorm. Some of the crowd who had planned to attend
couldn’t make it, but Murdoch was there as Mary’s maid of honor. The
couple stepped out of her father’s Kingston church into sparkling, chaotic
white. They had to spend their wedding night at Heathrow; their flight to
Paris was canceled.
♦♦♦♦
Newcastle sparkled, too, in its own way. Midgley noticed it as soon as they
arrived. It sparkled black. There were crystals in the coal dust coating every
building, and the street walls glistened in the sun. Midgley was under no
illusions about the reason. The gleaming buildings were an effect of the
grievous air pollution that the residents—especially miners—had endured

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for generations in this greatest industrial center of the north. The beauty of
Newcastle was like the beauty of the sunsets of 1883 after the eruption of
Krakatoa. But without forgetting any of this, Midgley was still taken with the
loveliness of the place. She quickly became defensive on behalf of her new
city’s streets, its people, its institutions. When she left Oxford, she had to put
up with several people—even friends—condoling her “on the dreadful
prospect of [her] prospective exile from decent society.” Midgley was
offended by this “fairly awful piece of intellectual snobbery,”16 and became
over time an intensely patriotic, naturalized Geordie.
Late in the 1950s, she tried to think through the attitude she had
encountered in some of her Oxford friends. “The magnetic idea,” she wrote,
“is that the real thing can only happen at a particular centre.” She
acknowledged that there are “many techniques which cannot be learned
properly without the discipline of endless informed criticism.” But, she
added, “it will hardly do to maintain that most of human life is actually
fictitious. Observation suggests that people in provincial towns are in
general not . . . phantasmata or zombies . . . .”17 This punchiness might seem
odd in someone who later made a career out of resisting extreme positions,
but as a colleague reminisced: “there is a bit of Mary that likes fighting.”18 If
she saw a position as blinkered or extreme, she would attack it. She was
good at this—a little better even than Anscombe, a little more controlled.
The Midgleys had a child on the way within months; their first son was
born scarcely a year after the wedding. Midgley knew that when the baby
came, she would be busy. During that year, then, she worked to ensure that
she would not lose the niche she had carved out for herself as a public
intellectual. She took the time freed up from teaching and put it into writing
and broadcasting (still as Mary Scrutton). And she began branching out from
reviews to original commentaries. She had to moderate her pace, in the end.
She wrote to BBC producer P.H. Newby two days before her son was born,
requesting a small extension: “I know it’s the present fashion to type theses
with one hand while having babies with the other, but I should feel happier
with more margin.”19 (Was she thinking of Anscombe?) Still, she went on
writing. She wrote about philosophy, but also (as her producers and editors
got a sense of her range) about anything and everything. For the BBC alone,
between 1949 and 1953, she reviewed books by Erich Fromm, Arthur
Koestler, Margaret Mead, and Angus Wilson, plus biographies of Florence
Nightingale and Robert Browning. Her original talks were equally wide-

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ranging. Soon she was also reviewing novels for Janet Adam Smith at The
New Statesman and Nation. A new box arrived every three weeks.
Why was Midgley such a beloved freelancer? She had a rare virtue—one
that would eventually allow her early reading and writing to feed back into
her mature philosophical work. Midgley was not as intimidatingly brilliant
as Anscombe, but she had a tremendous capacity to take in, retain, and
synthesize. A colleague, Jane Heal, recalled how she could mention almost
any significant “great” book to Midgley—a novel, a work in the history of
science, a classic philosophical text—and Midgley would have read it. But
that was not all. Anything Midgley had read was there for her, instantly
available to be compared and connected with any of the rest.20 At home, she
would recite long stretches of poetry to the boys: by Arnold, Housman,
Kipling, and classical authors.21 This capacity to take in and hold onto things,
and to hold them together, was not the most valorized trait in mid-century
British philosophy. But it was essential for the work she was going to do.

“RINGS AND BOOKS”

Newcastle and domestic life were isolating. Though both were shaping her in
far-reaching ways, and though she was impatient with their cultured
despisers, there was no denying it: Midgley had less time for scholarship
during the 1950s and early 1960s, and less conversation outside the home.
She worked against it. Throughout these years, Midgley regularly joined her
husband and his colleagues for lunch. The Midgleys made their home a hub
of social interaction for the department. And she occasionally visited friends
in Oxford. But she read less and less philosophy. Declining an invitation
from BBC producer Roger Toulmin in 1961, she wrote, “I cannot talk about
recent trends in philosophy, because I have taken very little notice of it in the
last 10 years.”22 Her most philosophical writings of the 1950s came early in
the decade and were not published in philosophy journals. They are
interesting, though; they highlight two themes on which Midgley was
reflecting as she went into a chrysalid state. The first theme is about
philosophy itself; the second concerns human nature. When she returned to
the discipline in the mid-1960s, she would return to these themes, informed
by a wealth of extra-philosophical reading.
Both themes surface in an early piece on sexual difference. Midgley was
the only one of her friends to publish about sex and gender, though these

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publications are obscure. (Her co-authored 1982 book Women’s Choices is,
she noted in 2005, “the only one of my books that is not in print.”)23 Her first
reflections on these matters appeared in 1952, in a talk for the BBC Home
Service: “A Letter to Posterity.” Her assignment was to anticipate how the
situation of women might change in the century ahead.
“My dear Posterity . . . ,” Midgley began, and told Posterity straightaway
that institutional discrimination, of the sort at stake in pre-1920 debates on
women’s rights, was finished. “I’m not saying that there is no injustice,” she
said. “But . . . it is not the profound difference in status that feels like a
difference in species.” In light of this, Midgley asked, what ought to be
expected of women now that they had been “admitted to a thousand mysteries
from classical scholarship to engineering”? For, she said, women as a group
“still have their own peculiarities. They still defeat Plato and those other
feminists who . . . think of them simply as men who have accidentally come
out the wrong shape.”24 The androgynous ideal is a fantasy, Midgley thought.
But what are women’s peculiarities? More particularly, what are their
characteristic strengths?
Midgley’s (controversial) answer to her own question was that women as
a group are more gifted at integrative thought—at bringing disparate types of
information together—than at specialization. “Women by nature and habit are
not specialists,” she said. “They are more conscious of the complexity of
their subject and less powerful at abstracting.”* She wasn’t merely
generalizing from her own case, she insisted. She argued, for instance, that
Virginia Woolf’s great gift was for “holding together all the richness and
complexity of experience”:
[Woolf] could catch and record the innumerable gleamings of its surface without distorting it;
without forcing it to fit ready-made patterns and purposes. She attended to the shape of the whole,
however subtle and baffling. She would never sacrifice that dazzling immediate vision for a
diagram in black and white.

But Midgley acknowledged a personal—even confessional—element in her

thesis. She testified how much she admired “thorough and methodical
scholarship” of the kind Austin or Foot (or her husband) pursued. But it was
not her destiny: “I treat it with that profound and remorseful veneration that
all sinners feel for the virtue after which they perpetually struggle in vain.”25
Whether right or wrong about group-level differences between women and
men, Midgley was pursuing a point with wider application: specialist

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scholarship is neither the only intellectual virtue nor the supreme one.
“Human thinking,” she argued, “has two movements. There is the abstracting,
critical process, which has always been recognised as thinking: and there is
another process of imaginative comprehension, of comparing and balancing .
. . .” This was not merely an observation, either. In the context of 1950s
Oxbridge philosophy, it was a manifesto—a manifesto for the kind of
philosophy Murdoch was already doing, and that Midgley herself would
begin to produce in the 1970s. Hers would be a philosophy precisely of
“imaginative comprehension,” drawing on multiple bodies of thought,
“comparing and balancing.”26
This brings us to Midgley’s second early theme: the diversity and several-
sidedness of human nature. Apart from a few early reviews, all Midgley’s
philosophical writing from the early 1950s was about her philosophical
heroes, thinkers of past centuries who had resisted over-simple pictures of
our nature.27
Midgley’s most interesting essay on this theme never saw daylight. It was
a script she submitted to the BBC, which Anna Kallin rejected—the only
proposal of Midgley’s she ever turned down. Midgley’s thesis was that not
only one’s sex but also the shape of one’s household—whether one has a
spouse and children—has consequences for one’s thought. Midgley started
pondering this soon after delivering her “Letter to Posterity.” Three months
after that talk aired, she wrote to Kallin, “I have an idea . . . nearly formed;
i.e. I keep elaborating it when I do the potatoes . . . . It is roughly speaking
about . . . how dons inevitably see their subjects as dons, and how much this
matters.”28 As she said, the idea was almost whole already; she didn’t think
it would take long to write up.
When Midgley finally mailed the script two years later, it was much more
pointed. It began, “Practically all the great European philosophers have been
bachelors.” After supporting this claim with parallel lists of famous ancient
and early modern figures (“I do not cram the groaning scale with monks and
friars”), Midgley went on to speculate on the differences this might have
made in their theories of human nature. She focused particularly on the
differences between Plato (unmarried) and Aristotle (married).29 Aristotle,
she noted, showed a tendency toward “married opinions,” such as that
humans are a species “that goes in pairs, not only for procreation, but for all
the business of life.” Moreover, Aristotle was alert to the many varieties of
human lives: men and women, scholars, politicians, and tradespeople. True,

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he ranked men’s pursuits above women’s, and scholars’ pursuits above the
rest. “But, Midgley wrote, Aristotle “grasped the point that natures can differ
. . . that there were other lives and other virtues besides those of the scholar;
that perhaps it did really take all sorts to make a world.” Plato, by contrast,
“always kept the irritable sensibility of the adolescent in resisting the claims
of temperaments alien to his own.” Marriage, Midgley argued—a “willing
acceptance of the genuinely and lastingly strange”—has the potential to shake
people out of this sensibility, to awaken us to human diversity and
complexity.
Kallin, a worldly Russian émigré, was taken aback by this intrusion of
domestic matters into the serious business of culture: “I . . . think you lay
yourself open to the accusation of narrow-mindedness. What about at least
half of the philosophers you mention living in an illicit menage at least as
heavy as legalized wedlock?”30 Kallin’s reasons for resisting Midgley’s
thesis may have been as personal as Midgley’s reasons for proposing it.
Kallin was unmarried, though she had been for several years the mistress of
Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. But she also missed Midgley’s
point, which wasn’t about sexual exclusivity but about the consequences for
thought of certain experiences—specifically, the experience of sharing life
with another person.
Both of Midgley’s early themes sound once more in her most
straightforwardly philosophical essay of the 1950s, an essay on one of
MacKinnon’s favorite figures: eighteenth-century Anglican bishop Joseph
Butler. One of Butler’s most famous arguments is an attack on monolithic and
cynical interpretations of human behavior, like those of Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes famously interprets all human motivation as egocentric. (It is an
interpretation with a long afterlife, down to the present.) Consider some
apparently other-regarding concern: say you’re hoping a friend gets her visa
extended and can continue to live and work in a place she cherishes. The
cynical interpretation is that this hope is somehow about yourself. After all,
won’t you be pleased if the visa comes through? Aha! says the Hobbesian: so
you’re only hoping for your own pleasure after all. But Butler argues that the
Hobbesian interpretation is confused. Just because your concerns all belong
to you doesn’t mean that they’re all about you. And the pleasure you’ll get if
things work out as you hope? It makes no sense except on the assumption that
you care about something besides yourself. You can’t rejoice over your
friend’s visa unless you care about her. Otherwise: some papers being

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stamped and mailed, someone receiving them—these are indifferent
happenings.
It was this attention to the multiplicity of human concerns that Midgley
admired in Butler. Butler, Midgley wrote, reveres “the infinitely rich and
complex personality of man . . . that wealth of powers and impulses, which
admits indeed of harmony and direction, but not of the mutilation prescribed
by narrower moral systems . . . .”31 Butler is delighted, not annoyed, to find
that our impulses can’t be reduced to a single type, that they “can never be
understood by treating them all as acquisitive.”
There is one more element in these remarks that is worth drawing out,
because of its significance for Midgley’s mature philosophy: her suggestion
that the fundamental tasks both of moral theory and of human life are
integrative. The task of moral theory is to understand our nature in its full
complexity. It is to survey honestly the several sides of our nature, turning
from none of them in disgust, but instead working out how far they permit
“harmony and direction.” The task of living is to enact this harmony.

“IT MAKES ONE SCREAM”

Midgley was falling farther and farther out of step with the philosophical
mainstream of her time and place. The premier philosophical community in
England—possibly in the whole world—was in Oxford, where her friends
remained. And the dominant voice in Oxford was Austin’s. Austin was the
personification of specialist cleverness—“the cleverest thing on two legs,”
Foot later remarked—not of the comprehending intelligence Midgley
possessed.32
The opposition was not total. Austin’s thought bore resemblances to the
later thought of Wittgenstein (however much Anscombe hated to admit it),
and thus to the thought of Midgley and her friends. Wittgenstein had shown,
as Midgley later put it, “how our thought about language has to be rooted in
the complexities of real life, not imposed on it from outside.”33 This
Wittgensteinian lesson was the most important thing Midgley learned from
Anscombe, who rejected all “handy simplifications.”
Midgley was impressed with Austin, but she was more like Murdoch than
she was like the participants in Austin’s Kindergarten—or even like
Anscombe or (especially) Foot. What she was best at—“imaginative
comprehension” of disparate bodies of knowledge—was not regarded as

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real philosophy by her contemporaries. Even if she had been keeping up with
the journals, what she wanted to do had little standing among her peers.
Midgley more or less stopped publishing after her third son was born. She
reviewed children’s books and experimented with fiction, but dropped out of
the public conversation. She didn’t return until 1972. She was tired. And she
was disillusioned with her own discipline. One of her last original essays
before her quiet period was a piece in The Twentieth Century, comparing
her experiences in Oxford, Reading, and Newcastle. She reflected on the
large atmospheric differences between Oxford and these two “redbrick”
universities, as they were informally known. But her comments had special
application to the state of British philosophy in the 1950s. What struck her
upon moving to Reading, Midgley wrote, “was that it was possible to talk
freely. Dons openly admitted that they were interested in subjects other than
their own.” Moreover, “[t]he state of being unable to say or write anything
for fear one might get it slightly wrong was not common, and where it
existed, it was not held in honour. I cannot express how much I liked this.”34
Midgley contrasted this with the Oxford atmosphere, in which each
scholar
forms part of a . . . system of mincing machines through which any new work [is] put . . . . [A]s
Oxford is so sociable, there is no chance for a prospective author of forgetting for a moment how
the mincing machines work. Before he can develop an idea, he has begun to think of answers to
the criticisms that will be made of it. He would be a man of iron [who] did not spend more time
working out what will tell in argument than deciding what he really thinks.35

Among the bad effects of the Oxford atmosphere, Midgley wrote, is that it
“narrows the subjects studied in an incredible manner.” But her next remark
was perhaps her most vulnerable. “It is so difficult,” she wrote, “to insist that
a thing is interesting when one’s colleagues are bored with it; so
embarrassing to be caught paying attention to what is supposed to be left for
the amateurs.”* Turning directly to philosophy, she noted how her
contemporaries tended to neglect or misrepresent Aristotle—in particular,
his richly integrated treatment of ethics and biology. Aristotle didn’t limit
himself to psychology, ethics, and politics. He wrote on octopi and chickens
and mollusks. How would her contemporaries explain why Aristotle “took
the trouble to write about four times as much on other subjects as on what
they call philosophy?” It “makes one scream,” she wrote.36 Exasperated, and

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pregnant with her third son, Midgley absented herself from the professional
conversation.
But she was still reading.
♦♦♦♦
Soon after the birth of her first child—around the same time that she was
writing about Butler’s appreciation for the complexity of our nature—
Midgley’s parents recommended to her Konrad Lorenz’s book, King
Solomon’s Ring. Lorenz was the co-founder, with Nikolaas Tinbergen, of the
new field of animal behavior studies, and King Solomon’s Ring was his
attempt to make more widely available the ideas he and Tinbergen were
developing.
Lorenz and Tinbergen’s breakthrough insight was analogous to the one that
led Darwin to his theory of natural selection. Darwin broke with naturalists
before him by expanding his scope of vision and considering the sometimes-
competitive, sometimes-supportive interactions among organisms. Earlier
naturalists had devoted themselves to cataloguing species and arranging them
in taxonomies. This taxonomic project required close attention to
morphology, but little to behavior. Darwin, by contrast, was a field
researcher—not just bringing home specimens but also observing how
organisms live and die.
Lorenz and Tinbergen, for their part, insisted on studying animal behavior
outside the artificial setting of the laboratory. Moreover, they interpreted this
behavior, deploying not only their own innovative accounts of instinct, but
also a controversial heuristic. They postulated that if Darwin was right—if
humans and other animals are related—then our desires and emotions should
not be incomprehensibly different from those of other animals. Our
hypotheses about what other animals are thinking and feeling will often be
correct. We have to be critical, of course, and consider alternative
hypotheses. But we can also try to infer what other creatures are thinking and
feeling.
This, as I say, was controversial. Critics accused the new ethologists—
especially Lorenz, who kept lots of exotic pets—of “anthropomorphizing”
their subjects. The aspiration of many mid-century scientists, including
psychologists, was to eliminate the subjective perspectives of both
researcher and subject. Thus, Jane Goodall was chided early in her career
for assigning names to her chimpanzees instead of numbers. We can

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appreciate the ideal, which goes back to the modern scientific revolution: the
more we eliminate peculiarities of individual perspective, the “cleaner” our
results. But the attempt to study human and animal minds as if they were
billiard balls—known as “behaviorism”—proved completely unfruitful in
practice. We’ve learned far more about the lives of humans and other animals
by following the lead of Lorenz and Goodall and David Attenborough than by
studying them under the cleanest possible conditions and treating them like
very complicated machines.
As soon as Midgley read Lorenz’s book (which begins with a description
of his own life of academic squalor, keeping company with rats, geese, and
chimpanzees), she felt compelled to read more. Not only was Lorenz talking
about a topic she loved, but she saw that his concepts “could be used,
without distortion, to describe . . . the behaviour of humans . . . in terms that
could be extraordinarily fertile for further thought.”37 Best of all, Lorenz—
like Butler—reckoned fully with the complexity of his subject. Humans and
other creatures, he acknowledged, have disparate types of motive that have to
be integrated somehow, not imagined away. Even in his book On Aggression
(in German, Das sogenannte Böse, “the so-called evil”), Lorenz was
interested in understanding our impulses and their uses, seeking “harmony
and direction,” not “mutilation.” Midgley knew she could bring Lorenz and
Butler—Lorenz and moral philosophy generally—into dialogue.
Midgley began working through every study of animal life in the King’s
College library: the whole of section 591. She had never been so interested
in anything. She didn’t know yet where it might lead. She did know that
anything she wrote about it wouldn’t be considered philosophy by anyone
else. She decided she didn’t care. It was better to be damned with Aristotle
than saved with Austin.

BEYOND THE FRINGE

Ironically, Midgley despaired of doing respectable, Oxford-style philosophy

at the very moment when Oxford-style philosophy was coming under attack,
and beginning to come undone.
As Anscombe’s “Oxford Moral Philosophy” talk was about to air in early
1957, a young philosopher-sociologist, Ernest Gellner, wrote to T.S.
Gregory, proposing a pair of talks attacking Oxford-style linguistic
philosophy. Gellner, a Czech Jew whose family had fled to England in 1939,

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had been an embittered, troublesome student at Balliol after the war. Reading
PPE and concentrating in philosophy, he was nonetheless scornful of what he
was being taught and of those who were teaching him. He was passed from
tutor to tutor as he belligerently refused to conform his work to the
conventions of postwar Oxford philosophy. Finally, he was sent to
MacKinnon. MacKinnon read Gellner’s first essay and declared it
fascinating, but not a contribution to the topic. He gave Gellner a different
prompt and sent him away. This scene repeated itself for two weeks, until (as
MacKinnon later recalled with delight) “he cracked, and produced a first
class piece of work.”38
Provoked by a great tutor, Gellner learned to attend to postwar Oxford
philosophy (he got a first), but he never came to respect it. As a young
lecturer at the London School of Economics—teaching philosophy, but
housed in a department of sociology—Gellner set to work on a dismissive,
outsider’s critique of the whole enterprise of linguistic analysis as practiced
at Oxford. A sociological critique. His BBC talks declared his thesis: that
Oxford philosophers had made “a Koran” out of the Oxford English
Dictionary, setting aside all great, enduring questions in favor of small
questions of usage. Philosophy, he said, had been turned into “the higher
lexicography.”39
Gellner was aware of Anscombe’s talk. He alluded to it in his second
broadcast: “the usual objection made to this philosophy . . . is that it corrupts
youth. My own objection is the opposite. Here is a philosophy . . . which
could not corrupt a flea.”40 Gellner’s complaint was that, in an effort to make
philosophy rigorous in “a science-worshipping age,” philosophers had
banished all large ideas and large questions from discussion. Unlike
Anscombe, Gellner had no alternative program to recommend, and lacking
the sympathy or patience to interact closely with his targets, Gellner
descended to mere insults: “the Higher Philistinism . . . the tranquiliser of the
intellectuals . . . the constipated view.”41
The book-length version of Gellner’s attack, when it arrived in 1959, was
more of the same. Words and Things might have made a small splash and
quickly vanished. But then Gilbert Ryle refused to have it reviewed in Mind,
and Bertrand Russell attacked Ryle’s decision in The Times. The resulting
fracas was louder than the one following Anscombe’s talk. And since Mind
would not review the book, numerous other publications rushed to do so. The
book became a sensation, even as reviewers called it “tiresome,”

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“bellicose,” and “exasperating” (the last was Murdoch’s assessment in The
Partisan Review).42 Editorials appeared, both about Ryle’s treatment of the
book and about the state of contemporary Oxbridge philosophy, and Words
and Things became the biggest philosophical best-seller since Language,
Truth and Logic. The controversy was dramatic enough to convince William
Shawn of The New Yorker to commission a feature about it—which grew into
a book of its own: The Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British
Intellectuals (1962).
The journalist Shawn commissioned, Indian novelist Ved Mehta, found his
subject perplexing, and found Gellner of little help. Mehta concurred with the
majority of reviewers about Gellner’s book. Words and Things was
“passionate, polemical, and disjointed, and grouped disparate thinkers
indiscriminately—this much was apparent even to a novice like me.”43
Gellner mashed together Ayer, Austin, and Wittgenstein as if there were no
differences between them. But Gellner, like Anscombe, had tapped into a
growing sense among the public that there was something unsatisfactory—
perhaps worse than unsatisfactory—about what went on at Oxford under the
name of “philosophy.” A significant number of Britons had some exposure to
the Oxford style, as a result of how many Oxford degrees required
philosophy, and as a result of how the BBC routinely featured philosophy
talks and discussions on the Third Programme. The Third never drew many
listeners; it struck many Britons as pretentious. But The Listener had a large
subscriber base and gave the public some sense of what was under
discussion, both on the air and at the great medieval universities.
It is possible for a bad book to raise a legitimate complaint—or at least a
resonant one. Gellner had little insight into his sources; indeed, he prided
himself on not engaging with the details of what Austin or Wittgenstein had to
say. But he put his finger on the dismissiveness that was a signature of
Austin’s style. Gellner picked up especially on a cliché in mid-century
philosophical discussions: not understanding. “Cleverness,” he wrote, “is
displayed not by understanding much, but by claiming not to understand.”44
Midgley observed the same phenomenon and linked it to Ayer’s
condemnation of large domains of ordinary discourse as meaningless: “a
whole generation of undergraduates was excited to find that all they needed
to do if they wanted to refute some . . . doctrine was to say . . . ‘I simply
don’t understand that’ or ‘But what could that possibly mean?’ ”45

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 The public was now alive to these complaints. Indeed, for a few years in
the early 1960s, Oxford philosophy became a punchline. In 1960, Oxford
Revue alums Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore teamed up with Jonathan
Miller and Peter Cook of the Cambridge Footlights and mounted a wildly
successful revue, titled Beyond the Fringe. It became one of the most
influential theatrical productions of the postwar era, breaking a path for other
satirical, sometimes absurdist comedy like Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
One of the sketches in Beyond the Fringe was a send-up of Oxford linguistic
philosophy.
The cast were clearly familiar with a lot of mid-century philosophical
jargon, tossing off allusions to Ayer’s “sense data,” Ryle’s “category
mistakes,” and Wittgenstein’s “language games.” They or their friends had
been in lectures or tutorials with Austin, Hare, and others. Drawing on
familiar caricatures of eccentric don behavior, Miller slouched and loped
around the stage while Bennett twisted his arms over and behind his head in
a picture of self-forgetfulness. But the cutting genius of the sketch is in its
dialogue. The laugh lines reveal what a mixed audience in a West End theater
in 1961 knew or thought it knew about Oxford philosophy. That it could work
at all as West End comedy tells a great deal about the absorption of linguistic
philosophy into the wider cultural consciousness.
Early in the sketch, Bennett raises the question of the role of philosophers
in society: “I mean, other people have jobs to do, don’t they?” Miller
earnestly suggests that he will give an “example from real life” of the kind of
statement that people fall into making if not chastened by philosophical
analysis: “There’s too much Tuesday in my beetroot salad.” Bennett warmly
calls this “a classic.” (A bit later, he adds in a suspicious tone that Miller
seems “very fond of real life.”) Bennett dismisses Plato and Aristotle as
mere “paraphilosophers” (like paratroops, because they have “their feet off
the ground”). Why? Because they ask “entirely irrelevant” questions: “about
life, about death.”
The sketch concludes with an anecdote from Bennett, proving the
relevance of philosophy for life. He was in a shop that morning, he says:

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 BENNETT: And there was a shop assistant there who was having an
argument with a customer. The shop assistant said “yes.” And the
customer said, “what do you mean, ‘yes’?” And the shop assistant
said, “I mean, ‘yes’.”
MILLER: Ah, this is very exciting indeed.

♦♦♦♦
Bennett calls this “a splendid example” of “two very ordinary people . . .
asking each other what are in essence philosophical questions . . . where I as
a philosopher could help them.” Miller asks, “Did you?” To which Bennett
replies sadly, “No. They were in rather a hurry.”46
♦♦♦♦
In any case, it was now the 1960s, and with a host of egalitarian social
movements gathering, philosophers could no longer get away with the old
line that they had nothing to say about colonialism or racial or sex
discrimination or nuclear weapons—that it was their task simply to clarify
concepts. In 1955, Hare and Nowell-Smith had a discussion on the Third
Programme, titled, “The Moral Philosopher’s Job.” It would have sounded
far away and strange a decade later:

HARE:I want to ask you what you think we, as moral philosophers, are
supposed to be doing. Here we are, supported partly out of public
funds . . . and writing books which the general public as well as our
professional colleagues buy; I should very much like to know . . .
what you think the public is after for its money . . . .
NOWELL-SMITH: This is a question that has often puzzled me; the answer
must depend on the extent to which each individual purchaser is
already familiar with philosophy. The most naïve may expect
detailed practical guidance through life’s problems; they certainly
won’t get it . . . . Philosophers nowadays are much less ambitious.47

♦♦♦♦
The public did want help thinking about war and sexual liberation and the
distribution of scarce medical resources. By the end of the 1960s, the first
applied ethics center, the Hastings Center, was created, followed quickly by

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the Kennedy Institute—both in the United States, far from Oxford and
Cambridge. Freed partly by Foot’s critique, partly by public derision toward
linguistic philosophy, philosophers began to go beyond mere analysis and
clarification, and to contribute to public conversations about euthanasia,
abortion, and more.
The world was changing. And for the second time in her life, just as in
1939, Mary Midgley was in the right place at the right time.

“AN IMPOSSIBLE BUNDLE OF QUESTIONS”

In 1965, with her second son heading off to boarding school, Midgley finally
accepted a long-standing offer to join the philosophy faculty at the University
of Newcastle.* They had been in the North for 15 years. Midgley had never
stopped loving the questions she first encountered at 16, when she pulled a
dusty volume of Plato’s dialogues off a library shelf at Downe House. She
was as invested as ever in the conversations she’d had with her friends when
she was a young woman in Oxford. And though she did not love the kind of
philosophy that had taken over Oxford, she still loved talking about ideas
with peers and students.
Newcastle was a place where cross-disciplinary conversation flourished.
Though Geoff was a philosopher of language, he collaborated with the
University’s computer scientists and played in the orchestra. The Midgleys
formed a friendship with psychologist David Russell, who shared Mary’s
love for ethology and suggested more books for her to read. And Mary had
profited since 1961 from conversation with her next-door neighbors, Alan
and Eva Ibbotson. Both were trained biologists, and their children were
roughly the same ages as the Midgley boys. They went to one another’s
houses to watch the first seasons of Doctor Who. Eva would become a
famous children’s author at almost the same moment that Mary would begin
to publish in philosophy. Alan was now Mary’s colleague, and he had a
wealth of insight on everything that interested her most.
Midgley’s first years back in the classroom were exhausting, though she
was officially part-time. Everything was new again, and she was also
spending part of each day at home with her youngest. But within a few years,
as the work at home eased and Midgley reacclimated, David Russell urged
her to offer a course on animal behavior through the university’s adult-
education program. Russell shared Midgley’s sense that a comparative

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approach, relating humans to other animals, would be of tremendous value
for understanding human nature.
It was the pivot of her career. A few years later, she wrote that she would
“vigorously recommend” teaching adults “to anyone who wants to get an
impossible bundle of questions under control.”48 Adult-education courses in
England in the mid-twentieth century were populated by adults seeking
personal enrichment, not by professionals seeking advancement. Teaching
these students of varying ages and backgrounds, all of whom were enrolled
simply because they were interested in the topic, Midgley began to work out
a biologically grounded framework for talking about human nature and human
motivation, the thing she had been seeking since 1951. Back then, writing to
Kallin, she had already anticipated her great theme: “the many-sidedness of
human nature, and the inadequacy of all current official ways of regarding
it.”49 Now, approaching 50, she published her first scholarly articles,
culminating in “The Concept of Beastliness” in 1973.
“The Concept of Beastliness” begins with an attack on folk ideas about
other animals, which infect our thinking about our own nature. The savagery
of wolves, for example:
I have read a chatty journalistic book on wolves, whose author described in detail how wolves
trapped in medieval France used to be flayed alive, with various appalling refinements. “Perhaps
this was rather cruel,” he remarked, “but then the wolf is itself a cruel beast.” The words sound so
natural; it is quite difficult to ask oneself; do wolves in fact flay people alive?50

It isn’t just wolves. Plenty of other examples could serve: think of the folk
pictures of apes, snakes, sheep, lemmings, rats. Each is not only a folk
picture of another kind of creature; it is a metaphor for a trait that humans are
anxious to avoid. It’s bad enough that these folk pictures lead us into
unreasonable contempt or hostility toward other creatures. But they also lead
us into unreasonable ideas about ourselves: either denying our animality or
embracing fanciful pictures of it. Humans have long sought to understand
themselves through comparisons with other animals but, Midgley wrote, we
have “mapped [ourselves] by reference to a landmark which is largely
mythical.” We have aspired not to be “like wolves”—when not even wolves
are like that. And when we find traits or behaviors in ourselves that
correspond to our folk ideas about wolves, we have concluded that what we
need to do is conquer our own animality. In the second half of the article,
drawing on Lorenz and others, Midgley began to explore ways in which up-

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to-date pictures of our animal kin could give us more accurate instruction
about our motivations and behaviors.
“The Concept of Beastliness” caught the attention of Max Black at Cornell
University. By a delightful coincidence, Black had overseen Anscombe’s
first major publication in 1949, shortly after he arrived at Cornell. Black was
a linguistic philosopher, but unlike many of his contemporaries, he was
interested in everything language was about. He invited Midgley to visit
Cornell in early 1976 and lead a week of discussions with colleagues from
across the University. The experience was overwhelming: preparing daily
presentations for a group that included experts in every discipline touching
her subject. But their responses were deeply confirming. And almost as soon
as the visit was over, Cornell University Press offered Midgley a contract for
a book.
By this time, Midgley had found a rhythm in her writing. The boys were all
grown, and in the mild summer of 1976, thoughts she had been collecting for
a quarter century came flowing out. She had experimented with a thesis and
then with a novel. Now for the first time, she had a project she was
determined to complete. She delivered the manuscript for Beast and Man
that autumn. She had just turned 57. When it finally appeared, she would be
almost 60.

BEASTLINESS

Midgley’s working title for her book was Beastliness. In British English, this
is a joke: “don’t be beastly” means “don’t be horrid”—don’t be
disagreeable. The title alluded to the thought that inspired her 1973 article:
we frequently and disastrously misunderstand what beastliness—beast-
likeness—is. Editors at Cornell doubted that American readers would get the
joke and insisted on Beast and Man. Midgley suspected that the gender-
exclusive “man” would eventually become more awkward than the Briticism,
but she deferred to the Press’s judgment. The original title would have been
more apt, though. The impossible bundle of questions with which Midgley
started—destined to become larger—centered not on a contrast between
beast and human, but on our own beastliness.
Beast and Man was always going to be a substantial book, but it became
larger in the writing. After Midgley submitted her first draft, the Press asked
her to add a section addressing E.O. Wilson’s controversial best-seller,

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Sociobiology. This set Midgley back a year. Cornell then sent the resulting
draft for comment to experts in each of the major disciplines Midgley
addressed. They should have known, Midgley reflected ruefully, that “no
academic who is offered a chance to do this is going to miss the opportunity
to think up some criticism or other.”51 The book grew and grew. It grew until
it became hard to perceive its original shape. But the shape is still there,
discernible under the accretions.
Like the article that preceded it, the book begins with an appeal to think
more carefully about the likenesses and unlikenesses between humans and
other animals, and to critically examine how we express these comparisons.
The Western tradition has often been fearful or disgusted at our animality. But
given that “[w]e are not just rather like animals; we are animals,” this leaves
us with a misleading and unhelpful sense of ourselves.52 To think about our
lives is to think about our nature, and our nature is an animal nature. Midgley
then introduces some basic ethological concepts, in particular the distinction
between “open” and “closed” instincts. Closed instincts, like a honeybee’s
dance, are behavioral patterns that are “fixed genetically in every detail.”
But for a wide range of animals, including humans, there is little in their
behavioral repertoire that is “closed.” Instead, we see “strong general
tendencies” that express themselves in learned behaviors. Cats have an
impulse to hunt, but their mothers show them how it is done, and adults go on
refining their technique; they are “born with certain powers and a strong wish
to use them, but . . . need time, practice, and (often) some example [to]
develop them properly.”53 Open instincts.
With the aid of these and other key terms and concepts, Midgley turns to
criticizing too-narrow conceptions of human nature and of ethics. As
creatures with a wide repertoire of open instincts—of general motivational
tendencies—we can develop this repertoire in various ways. But the
repertoire itself is a given, and it is this repertoire from which we must begin
when reflecting on how to live—that is, when doing ethics. As each of her
friends—especially Murdoch and Foot—had argued back in the late 1950s, it
is absurd to talk of “choosing” or “inventing” values, as if just anything
could be important to us: never looking at hedgehogs in the light of the moon,
say. Humans are capable of caring about very surprising things; the oddest
things can become status symbols or conduits of religious longing. But these
acquire significance for us as status symbols, or as sacred. They tether to
some basic human concern.

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 It was a hallmark of Beast and Man and of Midgley’s writing across her
career to complicate extreme positions and easy oppositions. Not nature or
nurture, instinct or learning, but invariably, both. Like her friends, she
critiqued the existentialist picture of human beings as deciding, rather than
discovering what matters. On the opposite side, she critiqued the behaviorist
picture of animals and human beings as machines. In Beast and Man,
working toward a biologically informed ethics, she criticizes particularly the
timeworn opposition between reason and passion (including under that
heading both emotion and desire). A central point—maybe the central point
—of the book is to show how reason and passion form a system in which
each plays a role. What a good ethologist does is think structurally and
integratively about whatever species she is studying, asking how this or that
aspect of an animal’s nature fits into that animal’s whole “form of life.” She
doesn’t idealize anything. But she does insist that the animal has to deal with
all of it somehow or other, that everything must find a place within the whole.
What then are the roles of reason and passion in human life? How can we
successfully integrate them?
As Midgley saw it, the heart of the book is its fourth part, and particularly
its eleventh chapter, “On Being Animal as well as Rational.” There Midgley
offers an account of the place of reason in human life. Again she argues, our
evolutionary history has bequeathed to us a wide assortment of motives. It
has also bequeathed to us conceptual and imaginative and social capacities
that aggravate the conflicts between our motives. Unlike wolves, we
anticipate these conflicts, fretting over them before we even face them. We
even enter empathetically into the internal conflicts of others. We write
novels and screenplays, dramatizing or inventing conflicts, and consume
these stories for entertainment and instruction.
Any animal with conflicting motives requires some means of prioritizing
and harmonizing them. For many animals, this is achieved by the operation of
closed instincts. In her 1984 book, Wickedness, Midgley offers the example
of migratory geese who hatch one nest of young after another all summer,
until something—the temperature perhaps, or the angle of the light—triggers
their migratory instinct, and they leave their last brood to perish. The
difficulty in even contemplating this behavior is that we could not do it. Or,
we could not do it the way the geese do. Some of the greatest novels of the
past century—Sophie’s Choice, Beloved—are about people who are driven

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to turn on their children in this way and cannot live with themselves
afterward.
For humans, though, the same faculty that exacerbates internal conflicts by
allowing us to anticipate or even manufacture them, also enables us to deal
with them—to conceive, try out, and criticize various approaches to living as
whole and integrated people. In several of her books, Midgley quotes the
following passage from Darwin’s The Descent of Man: “it is very probable
that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would
inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual
powers had become as well-developed, or nearly as well-developed, as in
man.”54 Our capacity to be destroyed by conflict—identical with our
capacity to creatively resolve it—is what makes us moral beings. What then
should we say about reason? “ ‘Reason’ is not the name of a character in a
drama,” Midgley writes. “It is a name for organizing oneself.”55 Midgley’s
ethics is an ethics of self-integration, of thinking through how to do justice to
our whole selves.
♦♦♦♦
It is also an ethics that anticipates and addresses the difficulty Foot
encountered in mid-career, though Foot never perceived this. Foot, recall,
felt trapped by the thought that a virtuous person might end up worse off
because of her virtue. In general, courage makes a human life go better. Think
of all the important things you can do, for yourself and others, if you pay
more attention to what is important than to danger. But sometimes courage
leads a person to risk her life and there is no reward, or not on this side of
death. The courageous person suffers and dies. In that case, Foot thought—in
“the tight corner”—perhaps it would be more rational not to act
courageously. She intensely admired an anonymous German farm boy whose
last letter to his parents is preserved in a book of such letters by Nazi
resisters:
Dear parents: I must give you bad news—I have been condemned to death, I and Gustav G. We
did not sign up for the SS, and so they condemned us to death. . . . Both of us would rather die
than stain our consciences with such deeds of horror. I know what the SS has to do.56

Foot venerated this farm boy from the Sudetenland, whom no one could even
name. He was a hero. But for years, she did not see how she could call him
“rational.”

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 She eventually came to see herself as having been once more captured by a
picture—this time, a picture of rationality. Foot had not been able to see her
way past the idea that to be rational is to serve one’s own desires—whatever
they might be. But is it? Starting in the 1990s, drawing on Anscombe and on
the work of a later colleague, Warren Quinn, Foot asked: what “would be so
important about practical rationality if it were rational to seek to fulfill any,
even a despicable desire?”57 Supposing you want something grotesque, or
just trivial, and want it even at the cost of things that matter? Is that rational?
Perhaps we need a richer conception of what it is to be rational—at least if
it’s supposed to be a good thing.
Midgley’s integrative conception of rationality in Beast and Man
generates the same insight. “What is it,” Midgley writes, “that we so respect
about rationality? What is so good about it? Why, for instance, does Kant
sound convincing when he suggests that it is the only thing that can command
respect? We would not be likely to take this view of mere cleverness.
[emphasis mine]”58 Midgley here brings back something like the distinction
she developed in her earliest publications, between two movements of
thought—the abstractive and the comprehending. The latter, she says, is
what commands respect: not mere facility with concepts, but a person’s
capacity to hold disparate things together in her mind—the very capacity that
guards her against disintegration.
Moreover, practical reasoning as Midgley represents it—a necessary
response to our welter of available motives—“would be impossible if some
preferences weren’t ‘more rational’ than others.”59 In “The Concept of
Beastliness,” she expressed this in terms that even more plainly anticipate
Foot’s late views: “Rationality . . . is not an easy concept. It is not the same
thing as Intelligence, since you could show great intelligence in the pursuit of
something quite irrational. ‘Rational’ includes reference to aims as well as
means; it is not far from ‘sane’.”60
However important it is to have one’s resistances, Foot needn’t have
waited 20 years to learn this. She could have learned it from one of her
oldest friends.

OVER THE WALL

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Why didn’t Foot perceive what her friend had achieved: the solution to the
problem of the tight corner? She maybe never read the book. A needless
barrier had risen between Foot and Midgley. They never ceased being
friends. Midgley would always visit Foot when she was in Oxford. But they
were divided over philosophy in a way that they hadn’t been in 1949. Foot
bought into the conception of philosophy that Midgley rejected; in the early
1970s, she tried to revive Austin’s Saturday mornings.61 And she had
Austinian ideas about what counted as philosophy and what didn’t. Foot once
told an interviewer, “[Midgley’s] mind doesn’t quite work like most straight
Oxford analytic philosophers . . . I think she found her forte being witty and
sane on television.”62 Midgley, for her part, returned the compliment in the
Introduction to Beast and Man, where she described herself as having
“slipp[ed] out over the wall of the tiny arid garden cultivated . . . under the
name of British Moral Philosophy.”63
Foot may have been one of the people who—however unin- tentionally—
made Midgley feel like she didn’t measure up. Foot reflexively classed and
ranked philosophers, including her friends. Anscombe was first, she was
next, followed by Murdoch and Midgley.64 (Is anyone so alert to subtle
differences in status as someone who feels herself to be in the middle?)
Beast and Man appeared almost at the same time as Foot’s first collection of
papers. Foot dedicated her volume, Virtues and Vices, to Murdoch.* But
Murdoch does not appear in the index. And when Foot settled in Los Angeles
in the mid-1970s, she began to gather around her a group of colleagues and
students whom she regarded, and sometimes spoke of, as “the right sort.”65
That language especially—and language she sometimes used, contrasting
philosophers who could “take the fences” with those who “fell at the first
ditch”—was one more vestige or displacement of her upper-class
upbringing.
In 1956, in “Newcastle: Comments on a Case History,” Midgley wrote,
“Oxford philosophers perpetually . . . argue that philosophy which falls
outside their own backyard is—not perhaps valueless, but unprofessional.”66
A sad episode may lie behind this remark. In the thrill of discovery, Midgley
tried unsuccessfully to interest Foot in Lorenz and Tinbergen. Foot blew her
off, more than once. “What has that got to do with philosophy?” Foot asked.67
By rights, Foot should have been interested. In another mood, in another time,
she might have been. But as we saw, Foot throughout the mid-1950s was

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barely treading water. It may have been mere self-protectiveness, then. Foot
was always a slow reader. But her failure to connect with Midgley at that
moment—to see what her friend was so excited about—made it less likely
that they would talk later about Foot’s philosophical worries. They remained
friendly. In 2001, Midgley gave Natural Goodness a glowing review in The
Times Higher Education Supplement. But after 1949, they never
collaborated as they could have. Midgley learned from Foot, but not vice-
versa.
Only Murdoch seems to have delved seriously into Midgley’s book. The
endorsement she wrote for Cornell shows a clear perception of its character
and significance:
This is a very important book. Mrs. Midgley, a professional philosopher with a considerable
knowledge of biology, defends a philosophical conception of human nature enriched by biological
study. . . . Her two-way exercise in relating facts to values is among other things a formidable
contribution to contemporary debate in moral philosophy. . . . Mrs. Midgley has provided an
urgently needed bridge between science and philosophy.68

But Murdoch was by then, like Midgley, an outsider. Murdoch wrote to Foot,
recommending Beast and Man to her (“it’s good, quite a large operation”);
we do not have Foot’s reply, but the topic does not resurface in their
correspondence.69 Of Midgley’s university friends, only Murdoch saw, or
half-saw, the significance of what Midgley had achieved: a culmination of
conversations that had started between the four of them 30 years before.

* He was brilliant at this, and became a legend among the Newcastle computer-science faculty when
he came in one day to collect the output of a program he had written. Normally, this would be
garbage; something would be amiss in the code, and extensive debugging would be required
before the program would run properly. Geoff’s program was clean. He walked in, collected his
printout, and walked out.
* Anscombe’s daughter Mary Geach recalls her mother contrasting herself with her husband in similar
terms: “she said that he had the more powerful intellect, but that she had the greater ability to see
about and around a problem.” “Introduction” in Geach and Gormally, eds., From Plato to
Wittgenstein (Imprint Academic, 2011), xx.
* Midgley would later connect her experience to one of Murdoch’s great lines in “On ‘God’ and
‘Good’ ”: “It is always a significant question to ask about any philosopher: what is he afraid of?”
Her peers, she concluded, were afraid of looking “weak—vague, credulous, sentimental,
superstitious or simply too wide in their sympathies. . . . [T]hey were much more afraid of
looking weak than they were of missing something unexpected and important.” Midgley, The
Owl of Minerva, 155–156.

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* As it now was. King’s College became independent of the University of Durham in 1962.
* Midgley dedicated Beast and Man to her sons, “for making it so clear . . . that the human infant is
not blank paper.”

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 Chapter 9

“Time, Like the Sea . . . ”

What came of it all? The world never halts, waiting for philosophers’
theories. These theories are self-interpretations of an endlessly self-
interpreting species. As Murdoch wrote: “Man is a creature who makes
pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.”1 But while
some of our self-interpretations obscure, others enlighten. The four friends
shone a new, old light on the human landscape. They let us see ourselves
differently, and better.
Murdoch called the fact–value dichotomy into question. Anscombe and
Foot undercut Hare’s theory and urged a recovery of the concepts of vice and
virtue, and what Aristotle called eudaimonia: a flourishing life. Midgley
connected this idea of human flourishing to an updated account of the animals
we are.
These ideas were then available, and philosophers began putting them to
work—starting with Anscombe’s and Foot’s ideas, which were better framed
for the guild. Especially significant was Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 book,
After Virtue. Drawing on Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy,”
MacIntyre told a declinist history of modern Western ethics, arguing that the
only options left to late-moderns are “Nietzsche or Aristotle.”2 After Virtue
did more than any other book to press forward an Aristotelian revival within
academic philosophy. Outside the academy, it generated debates about “the
Enlightenment project,” “the Benedict option,” and the importance of virtue
and vice in education and public life. A host of academic studies of “virtue
ethics” followed, as well as popular books like William Bennett’s The Book
of Virtues and Linda Kavelin Popov’s The Family Virtues Guide. The old
orthodoxy was broken.
But what happened to the four friends?

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MARY BEATRICE

It was ethics—ethics and animal behavior—that brought Midgley back into

philosophy in the 1970s. Her books Wickedness, Can’t We Make Moral
Judgments?, and The Ethical Primate are all extensions of the project that
began with “The Concept of Beastliness.” But Midgley soon became better
known for something else. Her reputation, throughout the 1980s and 1990s,
was as a controversialist, “the foremost scourge of scientific pretension” in
England.3 She set herself consistently against all sorts of reductionism,
arguing for the use of a plurality of metaphors and methods in understanding
the world and (especially) ourselves. Ironically, the part of Beast and Man
that launched Midgley’s career as a public intellectual was the part she only
wrote at the request of her publisher, critically assessing E.O. Wilson’s
Sociobiology.4
Wilson impressed Midgley, actually. His project was to show how
evolutionary biology could help us understand social behavior—non-human
and human. Drawing on his primary expertise about ants, Wilson argued
convincingly that their self-sacrifices have a good evolutionary explanation:
though self-sacrifice leads to the deaths of individual ants, the instinct to
behave this way ultimately favors the survival and reproduction of ants with
that instinct. Wilson then panned back, generalizing his conclusions to all
social behavior in all animals.
The book was wildly controversial, denounced by Wilson’s Harvard
colleagues Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould for its genetic
determinism. Midgley’s take was more measured:
People’s difficulty about seeing themselves as members of the one creation has come from a
crude, narrow, highly abstract notion of what the other members were like. Wilson . . . [conveys]
that vastness and coherence. He shows how the tendencies that make social behavior possible
have evolved separately in many very different kinds of animals, how they vary greatly . . . yet
how their variations converge to certain patterns which, for intelligible reasons, must tend to favor
species survival . . . .5

But Midgley noted, too, that Wilson’s “thesis was couched in language . . .
much cruder and more provocative than that of the ethologists.” And Wilson
was reductionist, insistent on one and only one mode of explanation. He
dismissed the messy fieldwork of researchers like Lorenz and Goodall in
favor of clean, quantitative studies of population genetics.

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 One of Midgley’s purposes in Beast and Man was to persuade people that
we cannot understand ourselves without understanding our animal nature. An
evolutionary perspective is part of that. Certainly, no trait can spread in a
population if it is incompatible with the spread of that population. But in
Sociobiology, Wilson went further—describing evolved behavior as
“selfish,” involving “manipulation,” even “spite.” Midgley worried that such
talk would distract people “from the serious enquiries into human and animal
motivation that the ethologists had started.”6
Wilson’s talk of selfishness gave off an aura of tough realism, but it
involved a conceptual confusion. Again: no trait can spread in a population if
its tendency is to wither that population. But that doesn’t mean that
reproductive fitness is the only thing on an organism’s mind—or that it’s on
that organism’s mind at all. Notwithstanding occasional disclaimers to the
contrary, Wilson regularly conflated the claim that a trait helps (or at least
doesn’t hurt) a population’s stability with the claim that members of that
population are motivated by this. Think of the ending of Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, when Willy Wonka selects Charlie to inherit his estate
on account of Charlie’s childlike innocence and wonder. Does this imply that
Charlie had a factory-getting strategy? In a sense he did. Innocence and
wonder were, in that odd context, factory-getting traits. A point worth
noticing! But not one that illuminates how the world looked to Charlie or
why. There is more to say.
♦♦♦♦
While Midgley was working on Beast and Man, another book appeared that
made an even bigger splash than Wilson’s: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish
Gene (1976). Midgley heard about The Selfish Gene, of course—anyone
with her interests would have. In the middle of her 50-page discussion of
Wilson, Midgley remarked in passing that she’d seen Dawkins promoting his
book on television. She contrasted Dawkins with Wilson unfavorably. Where
Wilson expressed “awe at the glory that outlives us,” Dawkins gave off “the
simple glee of the intellectual who has found a way to put down his public.”7
But Midgley was too preoccupied revising Beast and Man to delve into The
Selfish Gene straightaway. In comparison with the “paving stone” Wilson
had produced, she judged Dawkins’ work sensationalist fluff. She didn’t
bother with it until 1978, when Australian philosopher J.L. Mackie published
an article urging moral philosophers to adopt Dawkins as a guide.8 That got

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Midgley’s attention. Her purpose was to get philosophers to think again
about the link between biology and ethics. It mattered to her greatly then, if
philosophers turned to biologists who wrapped their biology in bad
philosophy.9 Midgley opened Dawkins’ book and found the same ideas she
had criticized in Wilson, expressed in even more inflammatory ways and
without the compensation of Wilson’s rich and detailed discussions of ants.
Midgley lashed out with the most intemperate thing she ever published.
Was she worn down? She retired the following year to concentrate on writing
and on the many speaking invitations she was beginning to receive. Did she
despair at seeing a wildly popular book double down on Wilson’s
reductionism? Whatever the reason, Midgley let herself go. She had always
been good at polemics; exasperated by Mackie’s praise of a book she didn’t
admire, she opened with this: “Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any
more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological.”
She was just getting started. “There is nothing empirical about Dawkins,” she
wrote.10 “Dawkins’s crude, cheap, blurred genetics,” she added, “is the
kingpin of his crude, cheap, blurred psychology.”11
Dawkins was no less combative. He shot back:
Some colleagues have advised me that such transparent spite is best ignored, but others warn that
the venomous tone of [Midgley’s] article may conceal the errors in its content. Indeed, we are in
danger of assuming that nobody would dare to be so rude without taking the elementary precaution
of being right in what she said. . . . She seems not to understand biology or the way biologists use
language. No doubt my ignorance would be just as obvious if I rushed headlong into her field of
expertise, but I would then adopt a more diffident tone. As it is we are both in my corner, and it is
hard for me not to regard the gloves as off.12

Dawkins protested that he had said nothing about motivation. As employed

by biologists, he wrote, “selfish” is a technical term, naming only the self-
preserving or self-perpetuating tendencies of organisms or suborganisms
(like genetic markers)—the ways in which their traits increase or at least
stabilize their prevalence. If something about a species’ behavior has a
tendency to secure the survival of that species, that behavior is “selfish” in
this sense. (If democratic institutions tend to secure their own acceptance,
they are selfish in this sense.) Dawkins had included several disclaimers in
The Selfish Gene, noting that “selfish” was being used in the technical sense;
he was aggravated at what he saw as a perverse misreading of his work.13

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 The reality was complex. Dawkins was right; there is a technical,
biologist’s sense of “selfish,” and it was the foundation of his book. Midgley
had, moreover, ascribed to Dawkins views that he disavowed. In a reply to
Dawkins, she apologized for writing “so crossly.”14 But her critique was not
just a hasty, irritable misreading. Midgley commented in her initial article on
the places where Dawkins said his talk of “selfishness” was metaphorical.
She didn’t miss them. The trouble was, Dawkins was inconsistent. In his
quest for popularity—both accessibility and good sales—he cast off caution
at crucial moments. He cast it off, indeed, at the most memorable and widely
quoted moments in his book, writing of “ruthless selfishness” and “the
tyranny of the selfish replicators.” If you do not want people to
misunderstand your technical usage, Midgley said, you should not mix it up
with words (ruthless, tyranny) that scream the “unwanted” everyday
associations. In fact, Midgley said, Dawkins was working a motte-and-bailey
strategy: preaching psychological egoism until someone called him on it, then
protesting that he’d only meant something dry and technical. Here, for
instance, is Dawkins’ summary statement about human nature: “if you wish,
as I do, to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and
unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from
biological nature. . . . we are born selfish.”15
Midgley, like her friend Murdoch, attended habitually to the ways
background pictures structure and limit our thoughts. And in Wilson’s and
(especially) Dawkins’ wilder remarks, Midgley saw unconscious captivity
to Social Darwinism: the old, nineteenth-century idea that selfishness—
ordinary, non-technical selfishness—is only natural. She called this
“biological Thatcherism” and noted how badly it fits with “the widespread
tendency of social creatures to help, favor, and delight in young that are not
their own.”16
People differed in their assessments of the controversy, unsurprisingly.
Dawkins enthusiasts were scornful of Midgley. Konrad Lorenz, whose
writings first drew Midgley to ethology, wrote to her in appreciation of what
she’d said. The controversy certainly made her more visible as a public
philosopher. She was soon asked to speak at a conference on “Evolution and
Religion”; after reflection, she decided to speak about evolution as a
religion. That became the title of the first of more than half-a-dozen books in
the second stream of Midgley’s authorship: writings about the late-modern
tendency to look to scientific theories for sole or ultimate explanations,

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instead of crucial-but-partial ones. An invitation came a few years later to
deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh. Midgley titled her
lectures and the resulting book Science as Salvation.
♦♦♦♦
The Dawkins debate was not the only fight Midgley picked in the years
following publication of Beast and Man. Midgley was an activist, like her
parents. The Scrutton view was that politics is part of life; Midgley was
always puzzled by people who ignored it. Following her retirement, with
more time on her hands and a growing reputation, Midgley invested herself in
a cluster of causes loosely connected with her scholarship: animal welfare,
environmental preservation, and above all, de-escalation of the international
arms race. She was arrested in the early 1980s at a protest outside an
American military base near Oxford (costing her a visit with Murdoch,
whom she had planned to see that day). But her activism also took more
constructive forms. Her school friend, Lady Anne Piper, had become
involved with a newly founded organization, the Oxford Research Group
(ORG). Midgley quickly joined, too. From that time on, the ORG would be
the most important institution in Midgley’s life. The ORG studied how
government and military officials make decisions about nuclear weapons,
with the aim of exerting a restraining influence on these decisions. In 1984,
Midgley agreed to contribute to a regular column in The Guardian, “Body
and Soul.” The theme was wide open: non-technical reflections on topics of
public interest. Of Midgley’s dozens of columns over the next four years,
some were about scientific reductionism, some about education, but the
greatest number were about nuclear proliferation. It was the topic of her first
column (“Who’s afraid?”) on October 31, 1984. Later titles included “Down
to the last nuke?” and “No animal has horns which grow to six thousand
times their length in forty years.”
The ORG became the most important institution in Midgley’s life in part
because it was soon the only one left. In the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s
government pushed for the closure of a host of academic departments in
universities around the United Kingdom, leaving just a few “centres of
excellence” in each discipline. By the end of the decade, Newcastle—not
being Oxford or Cambridge—had lost its philosophy program. Geoff
Midgley, a quiet man, was despondent at the destruction of the little center of
excellence he and his colleagues had built over the years. Mary recalled him

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sitting on the floor in their home, watching television westerns and playing
solitaire. Mary turned to resistance, writing to her contacts at Oxford and
elsewhere, asking them to speak up for Newcastle and other small
departments.
A.J. Ayer wrote a forceful letter to the Times. But no one else of
comparable significance was willing to commit themselves publicly. A
couple of distinguished philosophers at Oxford wrote to tell Midgley that she
was wrong; a friend of Anscombe’s and Foot’s suggested that worthwhile
philosophy was so technically demanding that it could only be entrusted to a
few top scholars. This was bitter, confirming everything Midgley suspected
about the parochialism of the University that had formed her.
♦♦♦♦
Midgley survived, though. She survived like few people do. She survived
her husband by over 20 years. She outlived Murdoch, Anscombe, and Foot.
In 2005, when Routledge published The Essential Mary Midgley, Foot
attended a reception in Midgley’s honor. They were the only two left.
Midgley was 86, and had three books in her yet. Five years later, Midgley
discovered a new venue for public philosophy, appearing several times at the
“How the Light Gets In” festival at Hay-on-Wye. She turned up in her
Wellington boots, giving informal talks under vinyl canopies on topics like
immortalism. Midgley was not immortal and didn’t want to be. Death, she
said in her talk on immortalism, is the price we pay for membership in a
species that evolves. But she only gave up the Hay festival at 95.
Midgley’s last book, What is Philosophy For?, appeared just in time for
her 99th birthday, and a month before her death on October 10, 2018.

JEAN IRIS

When she left St. Anne’s College in June 1963, Murdoch didn’t abandon
teaching—only Oxford University.17 That fall, she started a part-time gig
teaching General Studies at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.
Murdoch rented a flat near Earls Court in Kensington and spent every
Wednesday with her new students. She had never been overly beholden to the
Greats and PPE syllabi, but the RCA gave her complete autonomy. A
postgraduate art college—the only one in the world, at the time—and not
state-funded, the RCA was free from the regulations governing other art

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schools and universities. They could teach whatever and however they liked.
A couple of years after joining the RCA faculty, Murdoch offered a series of
lectures on “Moral and Political Pictures of Man.” She had long been
convinced that one of the central tasks of philosophers is to critically
examine our background “pictures” of reality. In her lectures, she devoted
herself to this task. She gave audiences the impression of someone thinking
out loud in front of them.
More than the freedom at the RCA, though, Murdoch loved the people: the
bohemian painters and sculptors and filmmakers and designers who were
now her colleagues and students. And she loved the setting. Her husband
John Bayley didn’t care for cities; Murdoch loved them. So for the next half-
decade, Murdoch spent two nights a week on her own in the heart of London
—a weekly private holiday. She visited her mother in nearby Barons Court,
she threw parties for students, she studied Russian, she exulted in being
immersed in the museums and streets and people of her city for the first time
since the war.
Her students didn’t always respect her. Or more precisely, they didn’t
always respect General Studies: “the Department of Words,” some of them
called it. To complete their degree, they were required to produce a 12,000-
word thesis, but most just wanted to refine their craft. The thesis requirement
was there to ensure a reasonable degree of literacy among RCA graduates.
Some had never read a book, though—or didn’t care about the degree. They
regarded their time at the RCA as an advanced apprenticeship and moved on.
Murdoch, not easily offended, found them all delightful, even the scornful
ones. She called them “wild,” “utterly different from Oxford students.”18 She
took notes on her students’ speech, their clothing, their backgrounds—
endless raw material for her fiction.
Some of her students, however, became deeply attached to her. Too
deeply, some of them. Murdoch was never careful about emotional
boundaries, and it was easy for needy students to seek more from her than it
was wise to give. David Morgan, for instance—brilliant, but wounded and
immature—entered into an emotionally and physically intense relationship
with Murdoch soon after meeting her.19 Murdoch was only saved from
another scandal when Morgan bragged to a fellow student that he was
Murdoch’s favorite. When this got back to Murdoch, she was outraged and
withdrew from Morgan for a time. True to character, though, she didn’t drop
him completely: “[h]aving taken you on as a friend,” she wrote, “I can’t go

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back on that.”20 She later helped Morgan find his feet as a young teacher at
the Chelsea College of Art. Around that time, another student, sculptor
Rachel Fenner (then Brown) became infatuated with Murdoch. Murdoch was
wise enough now not to let the relationship turn into an affair, and she
became one of Fenner’s principal mentors over the following decade. She
was remembered for her kindness even by students who didn’t become close
with her. She paid for an aspiring fashion designer from Detroit to go to Paris
for the first time. She bought four early works by Bridget Riley, who became
one of the leading figures of the Op Art movement. She always welcomed
conversation.
♦♦♦♦
The mid-to-late 1960s was an extraordinary period of creativity for
Murdoch. Breaking with her St. Anne’s colleague Margaret Hubbard and
with Oxford was like breaking a chemical or even a nuclear bond: energy
tied up was suddenly released. Murdoch produced six novels in seven years
and published her three best-known philosophical essays. In one of these,
“On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” Murdoch wrote,
Human beings are naturally “attached” and when an attachment seems painful or bad, it is most
readily displaced by another attachment, which an attempt at attention can encourage. There is
nothing odd or mystical about this, nor about the fact that our ability to act well “when the time
comes” depends partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of our habitual objects of attention.21

In the years before writing those words, she had lived this displacement,
slowly acquiring projects and relationships that re-grounded her and gave
new discipline and focus to her affections.
Murdoch’s 1960s essays resonate with general readers in a way that
contemporary philosophy rarely does. Their power lies partly in Murdoch’s
skill as a writer, which she brought to her nonfiction as well as her novels.
But it also lies partly in how these essays emerged out of the suffering and
striving of their author. Like ancient wisdom literature, they are full of vivid
descriptions of how our lives go wrong, and how they can be set right:

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 I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my
surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a
hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has
disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it
seems less important. And . . . this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention
to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.22

A central theme in these essays is the role of perception (or “vision”) in

moral self-transcendence. Often what hinders us from treating others well,
Murdoch says, is a haze of self-concern that stops us from apprehending
them: their thoughts, their longings, their histories, their characters. “Love,”
Murdoch writes, “is the perception of individuals.” This thought is central
not only to her moral philosophy but also to her fiction, which is full of
characters living in fantasy worlds of their own making. “Love,” she adds,
“is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is
real.”23
Perhaps the most famous passage in any of Murdoch’s post-Oxford essays
is a novelist’s thought-experiment on this theme. Murdoch imagines a mother
(“M”) who finds her daughter-in-law (“D”) unrefined, loud, “tiresomely
juvenile.” But M is also self-critical: “I am old-fashioned and conventional. I
may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly
jealous. Let me look again.” Murdoch traces a possible vector of growth
from this moment: “M observes D or at least reflects deliberately about D,
until gradually her vision of D alters. . . . D is discovered to be . . . not
undignified but spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but
delightfully youthful, and so on.”24 Through sustained attention, M comes to
see more and better. And thus she and her relationships are healed.
♦♦♦♦
Not everyone admires Murdoch’s later essays. Foot could never understand
what people saw in the M and D fable and “sometimes spoke of [its]
admirers . . . as if they must be feeble-minded.”25 All this talk of purified
vision sounded religious—which Foot was resolutely not. She and Murdoch
had inherited different things from their mentor, MacKinnon. MacKinnon had
converted Murdoch—for a time, anyway—and imbued her permanently with
his sense of the spiritual dimension of life. She got from MacKinnon her
intense awareness of the dynamics of spiritual struggle—all the guilty
contortions of the human soul. MacKinnon’s legacy to Foot was different. It

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was his moral seriousness, his concern for the suffering of the world, that
inspired her. Foot was a woman of action, sorting clothes and writing grants
and running off flyers at midnight. She only wondered whether it still made
rational sense to act virtuously if your virtuous behavior would destroy your
happiness.
Foot came to feel about Murdoch the way she felt about Midgley—only
more sharply, because Foot’s friendship with Murdoch was more intimate.
She felt slighted, dismissed. “Iris left us, in the end,” Foot remarked.26 She
and Murdoch had taught together. They had worked together through some of
the key ideas—about rudeness, about the impossibility of grounding ethics on
arbitrary choice—that Foot had developed in her breakthrough articles. And
then Murdoch had turned away, away from the arena in which Foot had
finally distinguished herself. Though Foot loved her friend, this stung—
especially when Murdoch’s reputation began to soar. The first critical study
of her fiction appeared in 1965. Murdoch was always in the papers; she
spent hours each day personally answering fan mail. More than once, people
cultivated Foot’s acquaintance, hoping for an introduction to Murdoch.27
But Murdoch was no more at ease with Foot than Foot was with her.
Murdoch didn’t resonate with Midgley’s sense of having escaped Oxford. Or
if she did, she didn’t think of it as an escape from an artificial set of
constraints. It was freeing to traipse around London and teach feral young
artists and concentrate on her novels. It was freeing above all to get away
from Margaret Hubbard and to know that her marriage was no longer in
danger. But it wasn’t freeing to give up philosophy as she understood it—or
to pursue philosophy in a way that she knew Foot didn’t respect. Murdoch
had internalized mid-century Oxford conceptions of philosophy. She had
defended them in the face of Gellner’s attack. Murdoch venerated Oxford
philosophy. She just didn’t think she had the ability for it. Foot was a real
philosopher. She, Murdoch, was a dilettante: “a philosophical poet,” as she
said to Foot once.28
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that within a few years of Foot’s divorce
and the return of their former intimacy, Foot would become an object of
erotic fascination to Murdoch, just like Anscombe in 1948. Foot embodied
standards that Murdoch longed to attain. “I have always seen [Foot] as a
judge,” Murdoch wrote in her journal.29 But the effect was attractive, not
repulsive. Foot, Murdoch wrote, was “numinous, taboo.”30

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 Around the beginning of May 1968, Murdoch proposed to Foot that they
try sex. “I feel . . . about you,” Murdoch wrote to Foot, “that I can’t link
expression and emotion . . . that no expression seems quite easy, adequate,
right.”31 To herself, Murdoch wrote, “Philippa [is] the Sphinx. The Sphinx
knew every man’s secret, but did not always know that she knew.”32
Murdoch hoped for the revelation of a great secret, or at least to find a fitting
expression for her devotion. Foot saw that this was important to Murdoch
and played along. But over the course of a few days, it became clear that this
expression was forced. Murdoch had hoped to dispel the awkwardness she
felt before her friend. But the awkwardness was something they would have
to live with, alongside love.
Foot, for her part, tried to be sensitive to her friend’s insecurities—to
make sure she didn’t “act the tyrannical princess.”33 There was only one
wrenching moment in the decades that followed. It was about philosophy
again. In the early 1990s, some of Foot’s former students were preparing a
Festschrift for her. Anscombe contributed a piece. The editors asked Foot if
she would solicit something from her friend Murdoch. It was well-meant. But
nothing Murdoch had to offer was suitable for a collection of
professionalized philosophical essays. She submitted the text of a lecture,
riffing on Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God: arguing
that Goodness—the Platonic Ideal—has to exist. Foot didn’t think the piece
good enough to print but was ashamed to say so. She lamely suggested that it
was too theological. It was awful for them both: for Foot to have to review—
and reject—the work of her friend; for Murdoch to have confirmed what she
always feared, that Foot didn’t think her philosophical work any good.
♦♦♦♦
Though Murdoch always felt that her philosophical work was desperately
inadequate, she could never leave it alone, either. And she remained in
demand as a lecturer. As the Romanes Lecturer at Oxford in 1976, she spoke
about Plato’s views of art. Her lecture was subsequently published as The
Fire and the Sun. Then she was invited to give the 1982 Gifford Lectures.
This was a crisis. Burdened with a sense of the occasion, Murdoch set to
work on a sprawling project, seemingly trying to summarize everything she
thought about everything. The lecture titles convey the flavor and range:
“Tragedy,” “Consciousness,” “Politics,” “Must religion become
prophecy?”34 And so on. When John Bayley broke his ankle in the winter of

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1981–82, Murdoch got most of a year’s reprieve. But she only used the time
to torture herself with alterations, becoming more dissatisfied the longer she
worked. “I am just not a philosopher,” she wrote to Foot.35 And three
months later: “if it hadn’t been for John’s mishap, the whole beastly thing
would be over, I would have done it in a crazy, impetuous way! Now I see,
as I laboriously rewrite, how hopelessly bad, indeed partly senseless it
is!”36
Murdoch got through. Her talks resembled her 1964–65 series at the RCA
in their open-ended, suggestive character. For all Murdoch’s doubts, some in
the audience were inspired. Peter Conradi, a “hungry and dissatisfied”
seeker writing a dissertation on Murdoch, was enthralled.37 What Plato found
in Socrates, Conradi found in Murdoch: a proclaimer and embodiment of
strange new ideals in a world where older ones seemed desiccated. They
happened to get adjacent hotel rooms in Edinburgh and over the course of
two weeks established a friendship that would become one of the most
important of the next 15 years, for each of them: biographer and subject,
disciple and master.
Most people didn’t know what to make of the talks, though. Readers had
no better idea when, after a decade of intermittent, fretful rewriting, Murdoch
published the lectures under the title, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
The book was as disparate as the talks—though also equally packed with
provocative observations and asides. “A great congested work, a foaming
sourcebook,” one reviewer called it. Murdoch dedicated the book to
Anscombe. As the dedicatee, Anscombe had a steel-clad excuse for
declining when she was asked to review it.
But Murdoch kept writing philosophy, right into her final decade. In 1987,
she began a book on Martin Heidegger—another giant of twentieth-century
continental thought ignored by most Anglophone philosophers. The book was
in proofs in 1993 when she rejected it, judging it no good. This line from its
opening page could be an epigraph for her career: “would one rather be
damned with Schopenhauer, Bradley, Collingwood, and Simone Weil, than
saved with Prichard, Ross, Hare . . . ?”38
♦♦♦♦
Conradi rightly saw that Murdoch was offering new or reconstructed ideals
to a world bereft. From early in her career, even as she criticized Sartre’s
picture of human nature and his ethics, she occasionally talked like him, or

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like Hare, about what “everyone now knows” or “everyone must think” in the
disenchanted late-modern world. After she abandoned Christianity, she
gradually came to think of faith in the supernatural as doomed. As she wrote
in 1966: “Morality has always been connected with religion and religion
with mysticism. The disappearance of the middle term leaves morality in a
situation which is . . . more difficult but essentially the same.”39 It was a
recurring theme both in her philosophy and in her fiction: how to live without
God. In the early 1990s, Anthony Kenny invited her to dine with a group of
Rhodes Scholars. She scandalized them all, believers and unbelievers alike,
by opening the conversation with this pronouncement: “As it is now
impossible to believe in God, how can we preserve religion?”40
Murdoch came to resonate more and more with Sartre’s Romantic talk
about steeling ourselves to face a godless world. And really: in her repeated
attacks on Sartre and other existentialist thinkers, in her insistence that they
were posturing, she was taking a Sartrean idea one step further. Sartre
understood authenticity as facing the void without consolations. Murdoch
added that, if this is right, there is one last, hardest consolation to refuse: the
consolation of thinking how grand you look as you refuse all consolations,
the consolation of representing everything as tragic and yourself as Antigone.
The consolation, in other words, of the Dawkins sublime. Better, she thought,
to be a humble mystic on a quest for an ideal Goodness that we can
recognize, God or no God.
♦♦♦♦
A deep theme in Murdoch’s fiction, drawn from Sartre, is that the stories we
tell falsify reality. They are among the principal means by which people stop
themselves from seeing truly. In the novel that finally won Murdoch the
Booker prize—The Sea, The Sea—the protagonist, imperious retired stage
director Charles Arrowby, imprisons himself (and others) in a story about his
childhood girlfriend Hartley and how they are destined for one another. The
damage he does is incalculable and is only kept from being worse by the
other-directed attentiveness of his mystical cousin, James. At the end of the
book, Charles reflects, “Time, like the sea, unties all knots . . . Human
arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art
may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”41
In 1997, Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Already for a year or
two, she had known she was “sailing away into darkness.”42 Her 1995 novel,

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Jackson’s Dilemma, was a politely received failure. It grieved her that she
could no longer write. At a party in 1996, she turned to a person next to her
and said, “I used to write novels.”43 Her final journal entries, that same year,
reflect both the tenderness and fear that accompanied her decline:
Tiredness, weekness [sic]. . . . I feel exhausted. Grief. No, I am listening to the birds singing in the
garden.
We swam in the Thames, in our usual secret place, for the first time this year. Ducks, geese,
swans—a delightful man comes swimming in—we talked—No one else in the whole huge area
swimmed off he swimmed by, conversation, beautiful. The area: immense field, river, another
further on immense field, no one, no sign of the road. On other side, cows wander. Poor cows!
This is usual, actual, the way we go on—Absolute solitude.44

John Bayley didn’t seek respite care until very late. Friends stepped up. Foot
began having Murdoch over for lunch every Friday. Murdoch knew her friend
to the last. But domestic life became difficult. Between the menial chores,
Bayley began work on the first of three memoirs focused on Murdoch’s
decline, books that would frame public perceptions of her for years
afterward. In her 2005 memoir, Midgley wrote, “to be remembered only—or
even primarily—for the disease that destroyed one is surely a horrid
misfortune, an especially unsuitable fate for someone the rest of whose life
was as full and active as hers was.”45
Foot, too, felt that Bayley’s memoirs were a betrayal. She despised them,
and did not watch the affecting film based on the first, Elegy for Iris. No
elevated awareness of the realities of Alzheimer’s, she thought, justified the
infantilizing pictures of her friend absorbed in the Teletubbies or wandering
into the street. She and Conradi cast about for explanations. Perhaps Bayley
needed to do this to work through his grief. Perhaps it was unconscious
revenge on his magnetically attractive wife, who always came home but
never stopped giving herself away.
Murdoch died on February 8, 1999. On her last visit with Foot, Murdoch
kissed her friend’s hand. When the call came that afternoon, Foot was having
tea with Conradi. As they parted, she half-quoted something MacKinnon had
said to her years before, about the death of a friend: “you will never hear the
way they call you by your first name again.”46

GERTRUDE ELIZABETH MARGARET

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Anscombe was enormously productive as the new holder of Wittgenstein’s
Professorship at Cambridge. But her work diverged from that of her friends.
Apart from her interest in murder—that is, in the concept of murder, which
she feared was being forgotten or minimized in the late-modern West—
Anscombe’s philosophical interests never centered on ethics. Lesley Brown,
who studied with Anscombe in the 1960s, remarked that Anscombe’s
students at Oxford didn’t think of her as working in ethics at all.47 She
lectured on Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Wittgenstein, and
philosophical psychology. She never even repeated her lectures on intention.
Murder did remain a preoccupation, though, and she began teaching about
it after she moved to Cambridge.48 She defined it (subject to minor
qualifications) as the intentional killing of innocent human beings, and thus
stood with the Church, and against the rising tide of late-modern Western
culture, in condemning abortion and euthanasia as well as the killing of
civilians in war (the case she had first discussed in print). Each of her first
four autumns at Cambridge, from 1970 to 1973, she taught a class with
“killing” in the title. She had little interest in theories of ethics except as they
bore on this central question. As she wrote in 1981, “my interest in moral
philosophy has been more in particular moral questions than in what is now
called ‘meta-ethics’.”49 She wrote mostly on other matters: the concept of
truth, the writings of past philosophers, and the topic that first pulled her into
philosophy, causation. Like Murdoch, she became intrigued late in her career
with Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God.
♦♦♦♦
By the time she moved to Cambridge, Anscombe had been out of touch with
Midgley and Murdoch for years.50 Now that she and Foot were no longer
colleagues, they kept up less, too. There was one occasion during
Anscombe’s first years at Cambridge when Foot (between jobs) traveled to
attend one of her friend’s classes, titled “Killing and Murder.” It was like old
times. They argued again, this time over a hoary thought-experiment about a
big spelunker who gets stuck in the entrance to a cave, trapping his fellow
adventurers inside. They happen to have a stick of dynamite with which they
could blow up their stuck companion before rising waters kill them all.
Different versions of the thought-experiment have the big spelunker facing
out (so he wouldn’t drown with the others) or facing in (so he would).51 Foot

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journaled about the discussion. “If the . . . man’s head is inside the cave do
we injure him in blowing him up?” Foot asked. “Suppose him unconscious,
or if conscious frightened & in pain”? “PRF denies,” she noted. But
“G.E.M.A. asserts that we do injure him, doing him ‘wrongful harm’.”52 As
ever, Foot puzzled over her friend’s words, certain that there must be
something there to consider. But when they weren’t together, Anscombe was
not as avid a correspondent as Murdoch.
Anscombe remained always, immovably, who she was: a person devoted
to the Truth, to the Church, and to those in her circle of care—family,
students, charity cases like the alcohol-addicted gardener she and Geach paid
for puttering indifferently around their home.53 Little else mattered.
Anscombe’s wardrobe changed on her accession to Wittgenstein’s Chair, but
wasn’t any more stylish. In the stories told by pupils and colleagues at
Cambridge, she was no longer wearing a duffel coat and trousers, but instead
a cobbler’s apron and clinging tights or a maroon track suit. She remained
hard to place. When she first appeared at the Cambridge payroll office, the
clerk asked her if she was one of the new cleaning ladies. Anscombe paused,
then replied quietly, “No, I am the Professor of Philosophy.”54 On another
occasion, following a panel discussion on abortion, a woman in the audience
remarked that, as usual, the discussion was being carried on exclusively by
men, none of whom knew what it was like to be pregnant. Anscombe, track-
suited and smoking a cigar, was visibly amused.55
She shocked not only by her appearance but also by her convictions. She
had known since her conversion that her beliefs would divide her from
people around her. Her beliefs had divided her from her parents, recalling
Jesus’ difficult words: “Anyone who comes to me without hating father,
mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, yes and his own life too, cannot be
my disciple.”56 They had divided her and Peter Geach from their fellow
citizens (and even their archbishop) when they each declared their objection
to Britain’s conduct in the Second World War. They had divided her from
most of her colleagues during the Truman controversy. And after her move to
Cambridge, they divided her from the other Professor of Philosophy, fellow
Oxford transplant Bernard Williams.
Colleagues and students of Anscombe and Williams from the 1970s
readily perceived the animosity between them. Nicholas Denyer remembered
them “bristling” at one another at a meeting of the B Club, the University’s

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ancient philosophy society. The topic that day was Aristotle’s account of
material constitution.57 But the ground of their mutual hostility was not their
differing views of Aristotle, but their differing views of sex and religion. In
1972, a “review of English letters,” The Human World, had published an
essay by Anscombe explicating and defending the traditional Catholic
objection to contraception. (Anscombe and Geach had held a party to
celebrate the 1968 publication of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae,
which reiterated the Church’s teaching after several years of intense
discussion about whether it should change in light of the pill.)
In a subsequent issue of The Human World, Williams and fellow King’s
College philosopher Michael Tanner expressed their “outrage” at the “rotten
thinking” Anscombe was defending. They called her arguments “offensive
and absurd” and said she was “preach[ing] impoverishment of life.”58 For
anyone familiar with the Church’s view, there was nothing very surprising in
what Anscombe wrote—though Williams and Tanner rightly noted the
“relish” with which Anscombe attacked “the spirit of the age.” They
remarked that she “presumably intended to confirm the orthodox in their
attitudes, to enrage the rest of her readers, and to render them incapable of
rational reply.”
Anscombe was invited to reply in the same issue. Addressing her
colleagues (“my friendly neighborhood philosophers”), she said that outrage
had put “blood in their eye and . . . blots in their piece.” Most of her reply
was dedicated to showing (“in the interests of better standards in
controversy”) that they had misread her arguments in various ways. But in
her concluding paragraph, she took a different tone:
[T]here is one thing that I don’t count as a “blot.” That is, when they accuse me of “preaching
impoverishment of life.” That is an honest accusation: it is something they really think about what I
really think. It is an old and intelligible accusation against the Christian religion. That one must be
prepared to lose one’s life in order to save it, that “being poor in spirit” is blessed . . . all this
Christianity has indeed taught.59

But, she added, “[a]t this point in time I look at that old accusation with
rather wry feelings.” What, after all, is “the thought of the most serious and
alive writing and theatre” of the age?: “[t]hat we are all crawling around in
shit, that all is hopeless and absurd.” She concluded, “I feel mild surprise
that anyone is angry with me for not much liking the spirit of the present age.”

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 Anscombe was a woman of action as well as words. Twice she was
arrested for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic: the second time when
she was entering her seventies.* But words remained her sharpest tools—and
her most dangerous. Near the end of her life, Anscombe almost destroyed her
friendship with Foot. On a spring day in 1997, Anscombe burst in on her old
colleague and began denouncing her. It was about Oxfam.
Anscombe knew Foot’s history with Oxfam. With Foot gravitating toward
the United States in 1972, she finally resigned from Oxfam’s Council of
Management. Her Oxfam colleagues pleaded with her not to leave the
Council; she was a distinguished administrative talent and knew the
organization top to bottom. Foot couldn’t see how the distance could be
managed, though. She regretfully walked away. But Foot believed in Oxfam
as deeply as she believed in anything. She was far more moved when Oxfam
invited her to deliver the biannual Gilbert Murray Memorial Lecture than
when Downing Street approached her the following year (1993) to ask if she
would let the Queen name her to the Order of the British Empire. (Foot
declined.) Oxfam was a thread running through her whole adult life, a source
of joy. In a journal entry in late 2000, she wrote, “Nanny and Michael: the
two from whom my happiness has come.” In a facing note, dated a few weeks
later, she wrote, “As well as from philosophy, and from Oxfam.”60
Anscombe had learned that Oxfam supported contraceptive campaigns as
part of their development work, and that they promoted abortion as a
fallback. She was appalled; now facing her former colleague, Anscombe
raged against her for condoning evil. A friend and former student of Foot’s
had an appointment shortly after the encounter and found Foot beside herself
with anger. Foot vowed she would never see Anscombe or speak to her
again.61
Foot was a woman of principle. But this time, she broke her word. As I
noted once before: Anscombe’s rages burned hot, then flamed out. During the
time Foot and Anscombe were estranged, Foot continued to visit Anscombe’s
eldest daughter, who had suffered a disabling accident. If Barbara did not
insist, Foot wouldn’t let the one rupture cause another. In fact, the opposite
happened—the one connection led to the restoration of the other. In time,
without any explicit reconciliation, Foot did see Anscombe again. And they
did speak. When Foot learned of Anscombe’s death in January 2001, she
wrote in her journal,

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 Now Elizabeth has died. I think about her life and, strangely for someone who so little courted
success that it was a hugely successful life. A wonderful marriage. Seven devoted children. A
marvellous body of work. And many Somervillians—undergraduates & graduates in her time—
who say they owe her everything.62

In her obituary for Anscombe, Foot said she owed her everything, too.
A few months later, preparing to talk about Anscombe on the BBC’s
Women’s Hour, Foot jotted down several pages of notes. She hunted for the
right epithets to describe her closest colleague. She called her “civilised but
totally unconventional” and “scornful.” “Especially,” she added, “of anyone
who wanted a Quick fix” to some philosophical problem. She settled finally
on “Truthful. A lover of truth.”63
♦♦♦♦
Anscombe died on the eve of the Feast of Epiphany, surrounded by her
family. After kissing Peter Geach one last time, she sailed into her rest.64 She
was buried next to Wittgenstein, as she had requested, in the Ascension
Parish cemetery in Cambridge.
Near the end of her life, Anscombe remarked to a mutual friend that she
and Foot had never had a cross word.65 By this time, Anscombe’s memory
was deteriorating. Still, Foot was surprised when she learned what
Anscombe had said. Foot included the line in the obituary she wrote, framing
it with characteristic delicacy and exactness: “she remarked once that she
thought we never had a cross word.”66 But that was the impression of Foot
that stayed with Anscombe: the devoted companion who had stood by her
side against the whole world.

INTERLUDE: RICHARD MERVYN (II)

When he died in 2002, Richard Hare left behind a long, introspective

“Philosophical Autobiography,” which his son published on his father’s
behalf. It begins:
I had a strange dream, or half-waking vision, not long ago. I found myself at the top of a mountain
in the mist, feeling very pleased with myself, not just for having climbed the mountain, but for
having achieved my life’s ambition, to find a way of answering moral questions rationally. But as I
was preening myself on this achievement, the mist began to clear, and I saw that I was surrounded
on the mountain top by the graves of all those other philosophers, great and small, who had had the
same ambition, and thought they had achieved it.67

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Hare believed for a time that he had achieved his ambition. Though it must be
said that he took a strange route up the mountain face. Over the course of the
1970s and 1980s, Hare slowly, gradually embraced utilitarianism: the
Enlightenment-born theory that our actions should aim at producing as much
satisfaction as possible. Given a choice between two (or three, or forty-two)
alternatives, one should select whichever promises to make everyone
affected as satisfied as possible, on the whole. The theory can be formulated
in many different ways. (How do we define and measure satisfaction? does it
matter whether satisfaction is reasonably well-distributed? do the
satisfactions of horses and gorillas and fish count the same as those of
humans? what about the potential satisfactions of generations yet
unconceived?) Still, the gist is clear: the theory tells people to base their
decisions on the best cost-benefit analyses they can manage, choosing
whatever promises the best results, so far as they can foresee.
Hare regarded his final views, expressed in his 1981 book, Moral
Thinking, as a direct outgrowth of his earlier ones. This was hard to accept.
How could Hare, whose great theme had been choice, now turn around and
say that there was no choice—that there was one correct set of principles,
binding everyone? Hare insisted he hadn’t changed his mind. In the opening
chapter of Moral Thinking, he explains: utilitarianism is implied by “the
language of morals.” So if you choose to use universally prescriptive words
like “ought,” then you must be a utilitarian—on pain of contradicting
yourself.68
No one has to use the language of morals. That language is a cultural
construct, however firmly established in common discourse. So Hare
remained true to his earlier views. The universe is billiard balls. There is no
underlying ethical reality—only the way Hare (and, he presumes, his
readers) happen to talk. They could talk differently—or at least try. So it’s
still technically a choice.
By the 1980s, though, Hare’s earlier emphasis on freedom had receded far
into the background. After the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, Hare’s
thought no longer centered on the brutalized prisoner of war standing alone,
stripped of all supports, clinging to his commitments by force of will. Now
his focus was on how warring parties—Irish and English, Pakistanis and
Indians—could come to agree. It was on the power of reason. As he wrote,
“[p]ractical issues are issues over which people are prepared to fight and
kill one another; and it may be that unless some way is found of talking about

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them rationally and with hope of agreement, violence will finally engulf the
world.”69
But Hare continued to think Foot and her friends were wrong—indeed,
utterly confused. Partly this was just deep-seated stubbornness. Even
affectionate colleagues—Anthony Kenny, John Lucas—couldn’t recall Hare
ever conceding a point. (Over the years, Kenny learned to engage Hare on
topics Hare had never thought about, like the nature of time. Then, without a
position to defend, Hare could be marvelously inventive, and genuinely
interested in the ideas of his conversation partner.)70 Hare’s dogged attempts
to bring people around could be comic. In the summer of 1958, a year before
they were supposed to teach together, Hare asked Foot if he could borrow the
manuscripts of her ethics lectures. Over the course of a week, Hare typed
twenty-one pages of critical commentary. Hare seemed to think that if he kept
reiterating his position, eventually anyone honest and clear-headed would
come around. He and Kenny once discussed a proposal to publish a volume
including some of his work and the work of critics like Foot. “I would not
wish to bestow immortality on such ephemera,” Hare replied.71
Hare didn’t merely think that he was right. He also thought, from almost as
soon as he returned to Oxford, that Ayer was right. Not in his account of
moral language, but in his fundamental picture of the world. Ethics can’t be
grounded in facts—in anything that merely is. Ethics is a construction. It is a
creature of words, of language. It is artifice.
♦♦♦♦
Hare died grieving his legacy. At the end, a stroke stopped him from
continuing to articulate once more, and once more, in the face of obstinate
critics what he knew—knew—was true. Though he inspired several
enormously influential students—Peter Singer, Derek Parfit—after 1958, his
views were never again an orthodoxy. Never again did most of his peers
defer to him. In 1984, he wrote to Foot, seizing on something she’d written
that reminded him of his own views, and suggesting that maybe she was at
last coming around. Could he have believed what he wrote? Foot replied:
“As for the Hare-Foot axis, we could always try it, but I am not very
hopeful.”72 Two years later, his former student and colleague John Lucas
spoke to Hare on his birthday. Lucas found him despondent:

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 Dick told me that his life had been a failure: he had converted nobody to his views, he had had no
disciples. In vain I expostulated, pointing out that he had been the most influential moral philosopher
in the second half of the twentieth century, whose arguments had had to be considered by
everyone else who thought about the subject. Dick was determined to be disappointed.73

Hare had endured appalling physical suffering and carried no bitterness. He

and his wife vacationed in Japan once, after he retired from Oxford. He
delighted in the place, the people, the culture. The only allusion he made to
what he had suffered in 1943 was a passing comment as they were hurrying
with a lot of luggage to catch a train. Hare remarked that the last time he was
in East Asia, he’d hauled heavier things each day, so he ought to be able to
bear it.74
But he never stopped being galled by Foot’s critique.
On May 10, 1994, Foot gave the annual H.L.A. Hart Memorial Lecture at
Oxford. Foot’s lecture, “Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?”, was
one of her first statements of the Midgley-esque view she would develop in
Natural Goodness. It was a major occasion. Many of the University’s
philosophy faculty were in attendance. At the outset, as is customary, Foot
praised the person in whose memory the lectures are held: her longtime
colleague in jurisprudence, Herbert Hart. But after concluding her talk, Foot
said there was someone else she wanted to acknowledge, someone who had
had a tremendous impact on moral philosophy, someone richly worthy of
recognition. She named Hare. Roger Teichmann, sitting in the audience,
wasn’t sure as Foot started this eulogy whom she meant—or perhaps he was
so surprised, he couldn’t believe it. There was a round of applause, which
Hare received unsmilingly.75 It wasn’t enough.
Foot was a genius at reconciliation: with Murdoch, with Anscombe. Late
in life, even she and Michael met and spoke warmly—though, after one of
their conversations, she wrote in her journal, “lest I should have any regret
for the loss of him he showed himself as much of an ass as ever,” exulting
“over . . . the genes of his grandson.”76 But with Hare she failed. She had
supposed that the fundamental thing was their both being old Oxford
philosophers, with a wealth of memories and friends in common. Let the
young fight, she thought. We have seen fashions come and go. Let us
remember what we share and part with good will.77
Some walls are too high.78

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PHILIPPA RUTH

If there are few true-believing Hare disciples anymore, nonetheless the

ethical naturalism developed in stages by Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, and
Midgley did not sweep everything before it. It has a hearing now. It is up for
discussion. But both inside and outside the academy, Hare’s deepest
conviction endures.
One of the foremost schools of contemporary ethical theory is
constructivism: an adaptation of the moral thought of Kant first articulated by
Harvard philosopher John Rawls and most forcefully and elegantly argued in
the work of his student, Christine Korsgaard. It is an existentialist theory.
Korsgaard doesn’t speak, as Hare did, of “principles” and “duties.” But
she does speak of “obligations,” and traces them to acts of self-commitment.
We adopt “practical identities,” she says—self-conceptions—and build our
lives around them. Once we’ve done so, the burden falls on us to live up to
our chosen identities. An obligation is the perception of a threat to some
identity you’ve embraced. If you conceive of yourself as someone’s friend,
for example, you will have notions of what behavior fits or doesn’t fit with
that identity. The pained awareness that your friend’s birthday is approaching
and you haven’t yet sent a card: that’s the force of obligation. But all of this
exists, Korsgaard insists, only from “the first-person perspective.”79 We
cannot be wrong about ethics—only inconsistent. We can, at worst, fail to
live up to the identities we’ve embraced.
Like Hare in the final phase of his career, Korsgaard tries to pinch readers
with an appeal to consistency. She depicts as vividly as Sartre the situation
of self-conscious, free beings in a valueless world. Our plight, she says, is
that we each need some practical identity. We are condemned to be free—
just as Sartre argued. But Korsgaard thinks that there are some very basic
identities—the identity of human being, the identity of animal—that are
inseparable from any more robust and particular identities we adopt. So to
claim any identity is to claim these more basic identities, too. But behind
Korsgaard’s view is the familiar picture: the billiard-ball universe in which
value does not exist unless we put it there.
And children around the world continue to be quizzed on their ability to
distinguish facts from non-facts: to recognize and be on their guard against
“biased” statements like “you’re in great shape,” or “education is important,”
or “murder is wrong.”

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 ♦♦♦♦
Nonetheless, there is now a minority report. There is an alternative to
explore for those who want to say, like Foot did in 1945, that the
commandant at Bergen-Belsen was not just inconsistent, or devoted to
different principles or self-conceptions, but wrong. Like a dissenting opinion
from an appeals court, the naturalism that Foot and her friends developed is
now available.
I noted already the emergence of “virtue ethics,” a family of ethical
theories inspired especially by the early work of Anscombe and Foot. There
is something ironic about this. Anscombe never used the term “virtue ethics,”
and Foot disliked it. If you’re going to ground ethics on anything, she thought,
don’t ground it on virtues and vices—important though they are. No, ground
ethics on what Anscombe called “Aristotelian necessities”: resources, traits,
practices, anything necessary for the achievement of some good. Horses
need exercise, and blueberries need iron. What do people need in order to
succeed in characteristically human pursuits? Virtues, certainly, like justice
and charity. But other things as well. Foot appreciated a line from Peter
Geach: human beings “need virtues as bees need stings.”80 After publishing
Natural Goodness, Foot worked for a while on a paper she never published.
The working title was, “Against Virtue Ethics.”81 But she was responsible
for a revolution in the academy. You can’t control what people do with your
teaching.
In any case, Anscombe and Foot’s legacy went well beyond those who
explicitly appropriated their ideas. Murdoch and Midgley were inspiring
teachers, but were most influential through their writings. Again, it was
Anscombe and Foot—especially Foot—who changed the face of the
academy. Preparing her obituary for Anscombe, Foot tried counting the
women who had come through Somerville and gone on to teaching positions
in philosophy, in England and around the world: Sarah Broadie, Onora
O’Neill, Rosalind Hursthouse . . . . Foot stopped when she got to 20. And
this is not to mention non-Somervillians like Cora Diamond, who attended
Foot’s and Anscombe’s classes at Oxford. Or the men who visited Oxford
and came under their influence (and Murdoch’s), like Thomas Nagel and
Charles Taylor. Or those Anscombe and Foot influenced at Cambridge and
UCLA. Foot was proudest of the women, though. She and Anscombe hadn’t
had philosophical mentors at Somerville and St. Hugh’s. They had done for a

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generation of Somervillians and others what no one had done for them:
marked a path.
♦♦♦♦
Midgley was the only one of the four who wrote at length about women and
men, and about the place of women in the world. She concluded later that she
had found her voice as a philosopher only because there were so few men at
Oxford at the moment she began to study philosophy. She suspected that the
same was true of her friends Foot and Murdoch. Quite apart from their
getting more attention from mentors than they might have gotten a decade
earlier, Midgley judged that the dearth of men during the war had
atmospheric effects. Drawing on her immersion in animal-behavior studies,
Midgley remarked, “[a]ny situation where a lot of young men are competing
to form a dominance hierarchy, will produce cock-fights. But . . . these fights
. . . interfere with philosophical work.”82 If there are people who like this
sort of thing better than conversations where people try to understand and
improve one another’s thoughts, Midgley suggested they set up “Departments
of Cognitive Poker.”
Foot might have dissented from her friend’s conclusions. At least, she did
not like to be labeled a “woman philosopher.” When Peter Conradi showed
her a chapter in which he referred to her and Murdoch and their friends as
“women philosophers,” she said she preferred to be thought of as part of a
generation.
But all four noticed the small slights—the missed invitations, the
stereotypes—and were determined not to be messed with. Murdoch has a
wonderful, painful line in her one historical novel, The Red and the Green;
Frances Bellman, expected by everyone to marry British officer Andrew
Chase-White but feeling acutely unseen, remarks, “I think being a woman is
like being Irish . . . . Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take
second place all the same.”83 I have noted that Anscombe went by “Miss
Anscombe” her whole adult life—though this caused consternation among the
staff at the Radcliffe Infirmary whenever she turned up to give birth. But on
another occasion, in Cambridge, she spoke up when someone referred to her
merely as “Miss Anscombe.” She remarked that, while one might speak of a
male Professor as “Mr. So-and-So,” one would hasten to add that he was the
Such-and-Such Professor of This-or-That.84 Foot, for her part, said that she
first reflected on her position as a woman in philosophy when she began

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traveling to the United States to lecture. She noticed that she was frequently
introduced as “the first woman to give this lecture or that lecture.” Her first
thought was that it was “a funny thing to mention.”85 She thought, she’d rather
they mention that she came from the north of England. But then she began to
reflect and, in small ways, to resist. In 1976, an elegant-looking letter
arrived, informing her of her election to the British Academy. A keepsake.
Foot pulled out her typewriter and struck through the salutation—“Dear
Sir”—with four x’s. To the right, she typed “Madam”. And when the same
thing happened in 1983, on her election to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences (AAAS), she replied: “I was a little disconcerted to be
addressed as ‘Sir’ in the invitation. . . . you would I think be surprised if I
addressed you as ‘Madam’ and it is precisely the same for me to be
addressed as ‘Sir’.”86
None of this meant as much to her as the happiness or unhappiness of her
students, though. And as with the AAAS invitation, Foot leveraged her status
—her reputation—to make things better for others. Rosalind Hursthouse
recalled Foot coming to her rescue once, in her first year of teaching.
Hursthouse’s advisor Anthony Kenny had drawn her attention to a temporary
lectureship at Corpus Christi, one of Oxford’s men’s colleges. As a woman,
she was ineligible for membership in Corpus, but—Kenny pointed out—the
advertisement didn’t specify that the successful candidate had to become a
member. Whether or not they were caught off guard, the hiring committee
acknowledged Hursthouse as the best candidate and duly hired her. Then the
misery began. Her new colleagues treated her coldly from the day she
appeared in the Senior Common Room and at high table. Foot was in the
United States at the time, on her first short-term appointment after resigning
from Somerville. On her return to Oxford that spring, she checked in on her
former pupil and was outraged to hear of the treatment Hursthouse had
endured. She insisted that Hursthouse invite her to the next formal dinner at
Corpus.
Foot did nothing so direct or obvious as a dressing-down. At high table,
she was seated opposite one of Hursthouse’s tormentors, a well-known
philosopher of Foot’s generation. He and Foot fell into conversation about
the recent shootings at Kent State University, and the man said he thought that
the National Guard had acted appropriately. After all, he said, the students
had been throwing rocks. Foot corrected him: in the United States, “rocks”
doesn’t mean great boulders, as it does in England. She noted that the

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protesters had been armed chiefly with flowers. Then there was a lull in the
conversation and Foot saw the opening she had been looking for. In her
perfect aristocratic accent, in ringing tones, she said, “I will grant you, they
were being rude. They called the police ‘motherfuckers’. But really! If I
were to call you a ‘motherfucker,’ you wouldn’t think you would be justified
in shooting me, would you?” Such a thing had certainly never been said at
high table in Corpus. And the message was received. Hursthouse was treated
better from then on.87
♦♦♦♦
Foot could be wickedly clever. But the personal quality that her friends most
often remarked was a refusal to let polite forms come between them. “How
are you really?” she would ask.88 Not that Foot ever forgot her instinctive
decorum. She was “a back-room person” by her own account. One of her
teachers, Heinz Cassirer, characterized her as “pathologically discreet.” And
Midgley kidded Foot once that a graphologist’s report on her would read, “a
very secretive person.”89 This wasn’t only a comment on her poor
handwriting.
Especially for someone who routinely prodded others to open up, Foot
was secretive. Conradi recalled her telling him once that she had just
destroyed a load of personal documents. “That ought to throw them off the
scent!” she said.90 In the hunting metaphors she loved, she was now the fox.
She told Conradi that she had likewise destroyed a suitcase full of letters
from Donald MacKinnon—though she passed along a select few.91
♦♦♦♦
We are, to a large degree, who our most significant friends and relations have
made us. Like Murdoch, Foot venerated and brooded on her mentors to the
end of her life. She venerated and brooded on Anscombe. And she venerated
and brooded on MacKinnon. MacKinnon’s place in Foot’s imagination was
as complex as Anscombe’s. Foot told Murdoch once that MacKinnon had
“put her [Foot] against Christianity.”92 Foot insisted, in a number of late
interviews, that she had been firmly atheistic her whole adult life. But she
did ask MacKinnon, early in their friendship, whether he thought she needed
to become a Christian. And her remark to Murdoch suggests a moment of
turning. In her final journal, from 1996 forward—one of the few she didn’t

210
destroy—few names appear as frequently as “Donald,” who she once said
“created” her, and also described as “holy.” Though Foot was not a believer,
she yearned toward the ritual and eternal contexts supplied by faith. She
wrote in one of her journals of her longing to go to Chartres and spend
several days immersed in the cathedral’s rhythms of worship and prayer. She
then did. In 1997, she records reading through the passion narrative of John
on Good Friday. And in the 1980s, on a trip to the continent, she stopped in
an old chapel and lit a candle for MacKinnon: “It was to burn for all time, in
memory of all he did for me, and for his unhappy life.”93
Whatever she made of his beliefs, MacKinnon was the person who had
spoken to Foot most powerfully about grief and loss. As she walked forward
into the 2000s without her closest friends, she recalled in her journal
something MacKinnon had said to her: “I remember Donald saying of his
friend . . . that he could never ever see him again. And as I write this
Donald’s great bulk and ever-so-distinctive voice come before me.”94 Her
late journals are a catalog of such losses. Repeatedly she compares them to
losing MacKinnon. On January 15, 2001: “Elizabeth died on Jan. 5th.
Everything is done for the first time in the different world that is without her.
(Like going to London for the first time after Donald had died. This time it
was merely going, or looking, into the garden.)”
♦♦♦♦
Foot died on her ninetieth birthday, October 3, 2010. She outlived Anscombe
and Murdoch both. Foot had other old friends—Midgley, the Dummetts—but
none so central to her life. How hard it is to go on alone. In her last decades,
she became a more attentive mentor than Anscombe, Midgley, or even
Murdoch. Her students were her children. Anscombe and Midgley had
families. Murdoch had correspondents all over the world. Foot had
Hursthouse and others. For years, former students routinely came and went
from the house Foot took over when her oldest friend, Anne Cobbe, died.
Foot became a model, too, of the devoted adoptive aunt. The Dummetts
invited her to Christmas gatherings, and she bought gifts for each of the many
Dummett grandchildren. But in the gaps between visits from students and
others, the house grew quiet. She wrote to a friend of the “moments of slight
desolation as one arrives [home] alone.”95
Foot wrote, “It is not just that the dead are silent, that one can never ever
hear their voice again. One’s own voice is silent too.”96 In The Epic of

211
Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh despairs over exactly this: if his friend and partner
Enkidu is gone, if Enkidu’s beauty and laughter are ended, how can he bear
it? The poem itself is the poet’s answer. It is represented as the testimony of
Gilgamesh, carved on a stele for unseen generations to come and read.
Recorded testimony, recorded narrative: these are painful second-bests to the
living voice or embrace of the friend, “the pressure of [their] hand.”97 But
they are not nothing. They honor; they preserve. They can even convey life.
Tennyson wrote how, re-reading his friend Arthur’s letters (“those fall’n
leaves which kept their green”), it was like Arthur’s “living soul” was
present.
And we build on one another’s work. We borrow from our foremothers,
and leave things to our children. While the sun smiles on us, we collaborate
with friends and see what we can do together. It is the kind of creature we
are. After one of her visits to Barbara Geach, Foot visited Norwich
Cathedral. She reflected in her journal afterward on the “glorious nave of
Norman pillars and Gothic vaulting. And . . . the continuity of the place. So
many generations of ‘singing men’ and monks and custodians and builders
and cleaners. We keep things going—all of us who work in such places—and
in Universities too!”98

* Readers, I know, will divide over Anscombe’s staunchness: some seeing in her an icon of moral
courage, others a fanatic who could not intuit how the world appears to others. I hope I have
made both reactions intelligible. I spoke to sources in the course of researching this book who
revered Anscombe, and to sources who loathed her. I invoked Socrates once before in this
chapter. Socrates and Anscombe are importantly alike; the same effort is needed to understand
each. If you do not grasp how Socrates could inspire Plato and his friends to abandon their
prospects as young aristocrats and devote their lives to his teaching, you have not understood. If
you do not grasp why a majority of the Athenian jury would vote to put Socrates to death, you
have not understood.

212
 NOTES

Prelims
1. Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 123–124.
2. Midgley, email correspondence with author, March 11, 2010.
3. R.M. Hare, quoted in A.W. Price, “Richard Mervyn Hare,” Proceedings of the British
Academy 124, 134.
4. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962).
5. Iris Murdoch to Leonie Cohn, October 9, 1951. BBC Written Archives Centre RCONT1 Iris
Murdoch Talks File 1, 1946–1962.

Chapter 1
1. For the details surrounding this episode, I rely on Philippa Foot’s archived papers and staff file at
Somerville College, as well as on M.R.D. Foot, Memories of an SOE Historian (Barnsley: Pen
and Sword, 2008) and correspondence with M.R.D. Foot.
2. For discussion of the deliberations that led to the publication of images from the camps, and of
their impact, see Hannah Caven, “Horror in Our Time: Images of the concentration camps in the
British media, 1945,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21: no 3 (2001): 205–
253.
3. Again, see Caven, “Horror in Our Time.” The newsreel itself can be viewed on the website of
British Pathé. For further detail on the background and results of the parliamentary delegation,
see Myfanwy Lloyd, “The Parliamentary Delegation to Buchenwald Concentration Camp—70
Years On,” The History of Parliament,
https://thehistoryofparliament.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/the-parliamentary-delegation-to-
buchenwald-concentration-camp-70-years-on/. The quotation from Ranfurly is from her
published diaries, To War with Whitaker (London: Bello, 2014).
4. She recounted this conversation many times, including to her friend Peter Conradi, who relayed it
to me, as well as in an interview with Martin Gornall, available in the Foot Papers at Somerville
(SC/LY/SP/PF/10). My description of MacKinnon’s rooms is drawn from a short memoir by his
pupil, Vera Crane, in the Iris Murdoch archive at Kingston (KUAS 6/11/1/12/1). All materials
from the Somerville College Archives are used courtesy of the Principal and Fellows of
Somerville College, Oxford.
5. Jenny Anderson, “Only 9 % of 15-year-olds Can Tell the Difference between Fact and Opinion,”
QZ, December 3, 2019, https://qz.com/1759474/only-9-percent-of-15-year-olds-can-distinguish-
between-fact-and-opinion/.
6. Rhonda Dubec, “Fact v. Opinion Resource,” Lakehead University Teaching Commons, July 22,
2019, https://teachingcommons.lakeheadu.ca/fact-vs-opinion-resource; Sharon Linde, “Facts vs
Opinions,” Study.com, December 28, 2018, https://study.com/academy/lesson/facts-vs-opinions-
examples-games-activities.html.
 7. Kevin Cummins, “Fact and Opinion Worksheets for Students,” edgalaxy.com, March 31, 2013,
https://www.edgalaxy.com/journal/2013/3/31/fact-and-opinion-worksheets-for-students; Making
Judgments and Drawing Conclusions (lesson worksheet), Center for Humanities, 1977,
https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/wp-content/uploads/ported/lrc/studyskills/factsandopinions.pdf.
8. Horace Morse and George McCune, “Selected Items for the Testing of Study Skills,” Bulletin
Number 15 (National Council for the Social Studies, 1940).
9. Shane Mac Donnchaidh, “A Teacher’s Guide to Fact and Opinion,” Literacy Ideas,
https://www.literacyideas.com/teaching-fact-and-opinion.
10. Paul Blaschkow, “Let’s Stop Hating On the Fact-Opinion Distinction,” Paul Blaschko (blog),
April 1, 2017, www.paulblaschko.com/blog/2017/4/1/lets-stop-hating-on-the-fact-opinion-
distinction.
11. Among other problems, this makes it unclear how to classify fact-type statements that are false
(“vaccines cause autism”) or that cannot be proven (“there is a largest prime number”). Are
these “opinions”? Not by the linguistic tests the authors put forward.
12. Sarah Sumnicht, “Fact & Opinion Statements with Adjectives,” Education.com, n.d.,
https://www.education.com/download/lesson-plan/el-support-lesson-fact-and-opinion-statements-
with-adjectives/el-support-lesson-fact-and-opinion-statements-with-adjectives.pdf.
13. Charles Taylor makes this point in the opening chapter of Sources of the Self: The Making of
the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
14. Taylor (see previous note) has done as much as anyone to call attention to the character and
operation of these frameworks.
15. See Armand Leroi, The Lagoon (New York: Viking, 2014).
16. See Frances A. Yates, “Giordano Bruno’s Conflict with Oxford,” Journal of the Warburg
Institute 2, No. 3 (January 1939): 230. As Yates details, even after the works of the “School-
men” mocked by Hobbes and others were banished from the university curriculum, a different
kind of rigidity set in. From 1585/6, students at Oxford labored under the following statute: “all
Bachelaurs and Undergraduats in their Disputations should lay their various Authors, such that
caused many dissensions and strifes in the Schools, and only follow Aristotle and those that
defend him . . . .”
17. Here and throughout this discussion, I draw on David Wootton, The Invention of Science (New
York: Harper, 2015) and Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern
Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
18. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), I.v.11.
19. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (trans. George Montgomery), XI.
20. This story is also told—from radically different perspectives—in Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) and Christine M. Korsgaard, The
Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
21. Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi (1618), V.
22. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age?, 549.
23. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
24. Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., III, ed. Eric Gray, (New York: Norton, 2003).
25. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” stanza IV, 1867,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach.
26. Quoted in Taylor, A Secular Age?, 561.
27. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, second edition (New York: Basic Books, 1993),
154–155.
28. Philippa Foot, interview with Jonathan Ree, “Twenty Minutes—Philosophical Lives,” September
19, 2000, BBC Radio 3 BBC, broadcast September 19, 2000.

Chapter 2
1. Peter Conradi, Iris (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 128. In recounting this episode, I draw on
Conradi’s account, on an interview he conducted with Foot, available in the Iris Murdoch archive
at Kingston University, and on Foot’s staff file at Somerville College. Conradi became close with
Foot as well as with Murdoch while writing his biography of the latter. The detail about Foot’s
childhood tuberculosis is recounted in Conradi’s memoir, Family Business: A Memoir (Bridgend:
Seren, 2019), 177.
2. Pauline Adams, Somerville for Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 164, (quoting a
letter from Annie Rogers to Emily Penrose).
3. Adams, Somerville for Women, 163–165.
4. Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva (New York: Routledge, 2005), 76. I draw pervasively in this
section and throughout this chapter on Midgley’s delightful memoir and on personal interviews
and correspondence with her.
5. Nina Bawden, In My Own Time (New York: Clarion, 1994), 63–64. The entire passage is
priceless.
6. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 76.
7. Foot and Murdoch likewise showed themselves philosophers long before they discovered
philosophy, securing their scholarships with fine general papers.
8. Conradi, Iris, 86.
9. Bawden, In My Own Time, 68.
10. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 77.
11. Conradi, Iris, 85–86.
12. Conradi, Iris, 84. I rely throughout the following section on Conradi’s fourth chapter and
Midgley’s Owl of Minerva, as well as on conversation and correspondence with each of them.
13. Philippa Foot, “Iris Murdoch,” in Oxford Today (Hilary Term 1999), 58.
14. Conradi, Iris, 82.
15. Somerville College Report, 1938–1939.
16. Christopher Hobhouse, Oxford (London: B.T. Batsford, 1939), 101.
17. Quoted in Conradi, Iris, 83. From a contribution to the Badminton School Magazine.
18. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 89.
19. Quoted in Conradi, Iris, 90. The words are those of Murdoch’s intimate friend Frank Thompson.
20. Iris Murdoch to Ann Leech, April 1939, in Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-
1995, ed. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), 10–11.
21. Hobhouse, Oxford, 102.
22. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 95.
23. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, 1941, in A Writer at War, ed. Peter Conradi (London, Short Books,
2010), 187.
24. Conradi, Iris, 115.
25. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 97–98.
26. Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (London: Duckbacks, 2002), 40.
27. Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1977), 109.
28. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 98.
29. Conradi, Iris, 122.
30. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 123.
31. Adams, Somerville for Women, 164.
32. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 123.
33. The Vienna Circle, The Scientific Conception of the World (1929), in Empiricism and
Sociology, by Otto Neurath (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing, 1973). Emphasis original.
34. A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Minneola: Dover, 1952), 33.
35. Ayer, Language, 35.
36. Ayer, Language, 107.
37. Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: Metropolitan, 1998), 84–85.
38. Donald MacKinnon, A Study in Ethical Theory (London: A. & C. Black, 1957), ch. 3.
39. Nineham’s reminiscence is recorded in Conradi (Iris, 125). I draw below also on notes from
Nineham and others in the Iris Murdoch archive at Kingston University, as well as from
Conradi’s synthetic account and from Midgley’s The Owl of Minerva and Bawden’s In My
Own Time.
40. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 116.
41. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 117.
42. Conradi, Iris, 127.
43. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, November 6, 1945, in Living on Paper, 256.
44. The description is from the recognizable portrait of her father in her Booker-winning novel, The
Sea, the Sea (New York: Vintage, 1999), 30.
45. Iris Murdoch to Frank Thompson, January 29, 1942 in Living on Paper, 105.
46. Iris Murdoch to Frank Thompson, December 24, 1941 in Living on Paper, 102.
47. There is a document comparing the two in the staff archives at Somerville College
(SC/AO/AA/FW/Anscombe). Writing a reference for Anscombe in 1946, Wykeham Professor
of Logic H.H. Price highlighted two of her qualities especially: one, the depth of her knowledge
of canonical philosophers (“much more thorough and extensive than is usual even among the best
greats students”), and two, her “grasp of modern Symbolic Logic and of the rather difficult and
subtle techniques of philosophical analysis which are associated with it.” It was an unusual
combination, he notes: “the only parallel I can think of is Mr. MacKinnon of Keble.” All materials
from the Somerville College Archives are used courtesy of the Principal and Fellows of
Somerville College, Oxford.
48. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 113.

Chapter 3
1. The details in this section are drawn from a variety of sources: interviews with Anscombe’s
daughter Mary Geach Gormally, family friend Roger Teichmann, Mary Midgley, and Baroness
Mary Warnock; materials from Anscombe’s file in the St. Hugh’s College archives; Jenny
Teichman’s memoir of Anscombe in the Proceedings of the British Academy 115 (2001), and
Anscombe’s own remarks in the introduction to Volume II of her Collected Philosophical
Papers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).
2. Notes from an interview with Mary Mothersill, published in Amélie Okenberg Rorty, The Many
Faces of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 502.
3. J.R.H. Moorman, A History of the Church in England (London: A & C Black, 1973), 391–392.
4. Mary Geach, “Introduction,” in Faith in a Hard Ground (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), xxi.
5. Anscombe dates her conversion to 1935 in her earliest known publication: “I am Sadly
Theoretical: It is the Effect of being at Oxford,” in The Catholic Herald, July 8, 1938. The
 essay was a response to a call for testimonials from young Catholics, articulating their hopes and
fears for the future. The call went out the very day Anscombe was received into the Church.
John Berkman recently unearthed and republished the essay, with illuminating commentary. See
Berkman, “G.E.M. Anscombe’s ‘I am Sadly Theoretical: It is the Effect of being at Oxford’ ”
(1938): A newly discovered article by Anscombe edited and with an editor’s introduction,” in
New Blackfriars (September 2021).
6. Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva (New York: Routledge, 2005), 24. Midgley’s memoir is my
principal source in this section, supplemented by conversations and correspondence with her.
7. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 19.
8. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 23.
9. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 79–80.
10. Peter J. Conradi, Iris (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). Childhood information on Murdoch is
drawn from Conradi.
11. Quoted in Conradi, Iris, 33.
12. Conradi, Iris, 44.
13. Conradi, Iris, 59.
14. Conradi, Iris, 60.
15. Conradi, Iris, 66.
16. Conradi, Iris, 66.
17. Quoted in Conradi, Iris, 72.
18. Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Penguin 2010). The
following discussion draws on Overy throughout.
19. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 83.
20. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 84.
21. Irish Nationalist Constance Markievicz had won a Dublin seat the year before, but unsurprisingly
refused to take the Oath of Allegiance. Thus she never joined the Commons.
22. Not only the direct quotations but most of the other details adduced in the following paragraphs
come from documents in Philippa Foot’s papers at Somerville College. I have also drawn on
conversation and correspondence with Peter Conradi, on correspondence with M.R.D. Foot
(April 11, 2011) and on correspondence with Jan Hawthorn, friend of both Foot and her sister
Marion.
23. Interview with Martin Gornall, SC/LY/SP/PF/10, Philippa Foot Papers, Somerville College
Archives.
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann, “Maxims and Arrows,” in
The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1954), 467.
25. Journal entry for January 4, 1998, Foot Journals, SC/LY/SP/PF/3, Foot Papers, Somerville
Archives.
26. Journal entry for December 5, 2000, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville Archives.
27. Peter Conradi, conversation with author, March 10, 2011.
28. Philippa Bosanquet to Esther Bosanquet, undated, SC/LY/SP/PF/1/6e, Foot Papers, Somerville
Archives.
29. Journal entry for August 5, 1996, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, in Foot Papers, Somerville Archives.
30. Tom and Mary story, SC/LY/SP/PF/3, Foot Papers, Somerville Archives.
31. Alex Voorhoeve, “The Grammar of Goodness: An Interview with Philippa Foot” in The Harvard
Review of Philosophy XI (2003), 33.
32. Peter Conradi and Gavin Lawrence, “Professor Philippa Foot” (obituary), The Independent,
October 19, 2010.
33. Voorhoeve, “The Grammar of Goodness,” 33.
34. For richly detailed discussions of the formative influence of the Blackfriars community on
Anscombe’s thought and the background to her early pamphlet, “The Justice of the Present War
Examined” (see below), see John Berkman, “Justice and Murder: The Background to
Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’,” in Roger Teichmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of
Elizabeth Anscombe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) and John Haldane, “Anscombe:
Life, Action, and Ethics in Context,” in Philosophical News 18 (June 2019), 45–75.
35. St. Hugh’s College archive.
36. Evidently Anscombe did not tell her tutor what had happened. Indeed, she did not even tell one of
her closest friends. Somervillian Jean Coutts (later Austin), in Anscombe’s year and also reading
Greats, was with her constantly. She learned from me in 2012 that Anscombe’s father had died
in 1939. Coutts too lost her father in her undergraduate years; she said it would have been a
comfort to talk with someone who understood what this meant. Whatever she thought or felt,
Anscombe kept her loss private.
37. “The Justice of the Present War Examined.” Anscombe’s contribution is reprinted in G.E.M.
Anscombe, The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Vol. 3: Ethics,
Religion and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 72–81.
38. The following term, MacKinnon tutored Anscombe once more. Though he remained impressed,
he observed that “she would gain by being more tentative in her conclusions.” Anscombe does
not seem to have been as affected by MacKinnon as the three Somervillians were. She evidently
worked hard for him, and in 1946 named him as a reference in a job application. But she does not
mention him in her scattered reminiscences about her undergraduate years.
39. St. Hugh’s College archive.
40. In Roger Teichmann, The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (Oxford, 2008), 3.
41. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Introduction,” in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M.
Anscombe, Vol. 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1981), vii.
42. Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, vii.
43. Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, viii.

Chapter 4
1. I have drawn the specific details in this section from R.M. Hare, “A Philosophical
Autobiography,” in Utilitas 14, no. 3 (November 2002); from his son John Hare’s “R.M. Hare: A
Memorial Address” in the same issue, and from the “Postscript” to An Essay in Monism, the
(unpublished) book Hare wrote while imprisoned. In “A Philosophical Autobiography,” Hare
singles out E.E. Dunlop, The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop (ed. New York: Penguin, 2010) as
“the only completely truthful account of these experiences I have read” (from “A Philosophical
Autobiography”). For general descriptions of conditions in the railway camps during these
months, I have drawn on Dunlop. Groups of forced laborers were sent up from Singapore in
waves in the spring of 1943. In his “Autobiography,” Hare only says that he was sent to the
railway camps that spring and was there about eight months. An Imperial Japanese Army record
book, available at www.forces-war-records.co.uk, lists Hare and many others as having been
sent “Overland” on May 17, 1943.
2. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography,” 282.
3. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography,” 282.
4. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography,” 281.
5. Archilochus, fragment, translated for the author by Morgan Flannery.
 6. Sources for the following section include an obituary by Philippa Foot in the Somerville College
Report (1999), 135–138; Conradi’s biography of Murdoch, Iris (Norton, 2001); Midgley’s
memoir, The Owl of Minerva (Routledge, 2005); and letters and notebooks in Philippa Foot’s
papers in the Somerville College Archives.
7. Iris Murdoch to Marjorie Boulton, August 16, 1942, in Living on Paper, ed. Avril Horner and
Anne Rowe (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), 27.
8. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 134.
9. In Murdoch, Living on Paper, 30, 32.
10. In Murdoch, Living on Paper, 25.
11. Sometime late in the war, or perhaps after traveling to eastern Europe with the United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and seeing what the Soviets had done, Murdoch finally
became disillusioned with communism. Around this time, she also began to explore Christianity.
Her biographer Peter Conradi sees a connection, one faith displacing another. See Iris
Murdoch: A Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
12. Philippa Bosanquet to Esther Bosanquet, undated, SC/LY/SP/PF/3, Foot Papers, Somerville
Archives.
13. Nina Bawden, In My Own Time (New York: Clarion 1994), 71, 91.
14. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 123–124.
15. See Bawden, In My Own Time.
16. Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (London: Duckbacks, 2002), 42.
17. This profile of Ryle as “academic politician” is drawn from Hare’s “A Philosophical
Autobiography,” and from conversations with Mary Midgley and Mary Warnock.
18. “Introduction” to The Revolution in Philosophy (London: Macmillan & Co, 1956).
19. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography,” 284.
20. Warnock, A Memoir, 49.
21. This anyway is how Murdoch and Scrutton’s classics tutor, Mildred Hartley, recalled the topic in
a May 15, 1969 letter to Somerville Principal Barbara Craig (Foot Staff File,
SC/AO/AA/FW/Foot, Somerville College Archives, used by permission of Hartley’s executor,
Alan Poulter). Hartley was reminiscing on the occasion of Anscombe’s and Foot’s departures
from Somerville about how she (Hartley) and a colleague had been on a university-wide
committee in 1941, reviewing candidates for the Gilchrist studentship, and had independently
converged on Anscombe as the best candidate.
22. What were Geach’s objections? He never published them. In the pamphlet Anscombe co-
authored with Norman Daniel, she argued that although there were just grounds for war, the
British government had made clear that it would not refrain from unjust tactics: for example,
from carpet bombing German cities. It seems that Geach, too, thought that there were just
grounds for war. As Anthony Kenny reports in his 2014 memoir of Geach in the Proceedings of
the British Academy, Geach attempted unsuccessfully to join the Polish army.
23. Mary Geach Gormally, conversation with author, July 13, 2012.
24. In a 1946 letter, applying for a position at Bedford College, London, Anscombe mentions that she
had received a grant from Newnham College, Cambridge, each of the previous two years. It was
something, but cannot have been as valuable as the competitive Smithson studentship. (Box no.
10, File no. 370, Anscombe Papers, Collegium Institute)
25. Conradi, Iris, 283.
26. Letters from C.H.M. Waldock to Janet Vaughan (January 18, 1948), and from Vaughan back to
Waldock (February 21, 1948), both in Anscombe’s staff file in the Somerville College Archives
(SC/AO/AA/FW/Anscombe). Quotations from the papers of Professor G.E.M. Anscombe are
with the permission of the copyright holder Mrs. M.C. Gormally.
27. March 29, 1946 letter from Anscombe to Janet Vaughan, applying for the Fellowship, in the Mary
Somerville Research Fellowship file (SC/AO/FS/MSRF) in the Somerville College Archives.
28. Warnock, A Memoir, 46.
29. A quip attributed to Frank Ramsay.
30. C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of
Language Upon Thought and of The Science of Symbolism, 3rd ed. (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner, and Co., 1930), 149.
31. Warnock, A Memoir, 44.
32. R.M. Hare, “Postscript” to An Essay in Monism (unpublished manuscript, 1940–1945), typed
manuscript. Reference 0.1, Philosophical Papers, held in the Hare Papers in the Balliol College
Historic Collections. All quotations from Professor R.M. Hare’s unpublished papers are used by
permission of the copyright holder, Dr. John Hare.
33. Charles Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 21.
34. To adopt the preferred expression of Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, in their Grandstanding:
The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Tosi and
Warmke’s book highlights aspects of contemporary moral discourse that fit an emotivist analysis,
in hopes of persuading readers to reject these ways of talking.
35. Readers of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press,
1981) will readily perceive how indebted I am to his analysis of emotivism. My debt to Charles
Taylor’s Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1989) is subtler, but no less significant.
36. R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). The preceding
several paragraphs are a summary of the principal doctrines of the book.
37. John Lucas, “A Memoir of Professor R.M. Hare, FBA,” in The Balliol College Annual Record
(2002).
38. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography,” 273.
39. Rugby School Report, Biographical and Autobiographical Materials, Hare Papers, Balliol College
Historic Collections. Used by permission of Rugby School.
40. Lucas, “A Memoir of Professor R. M. Hare.”
41. Hare, The Language of Morals, 69.
42. Hare, “Postscript” to An Essay in Monism (unpublished).
43. Catherine Hare, conversation with author, August 1, 2012.
44. William Shakespeare, Othello, Act I, scene iii, lines 190–191.
45. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography,” 272.
46. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 148.
47. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 147.
48. Julie Jack, conversation with author, July 2, 2012.
49. Janet Vaughan (?) to Philippa Foot, November 25, 1948. Foot Staff File, Somerville College
Archives.
50. Journal 6, June 12, 1948, KUAS 202/1/6. Murdoch’s journals are held at the Kingston University
Archives. All quotations from Iris Murdoch’s unpublished papers are used by permission of
Kingston University.
51. Hare, “Philosophical Autobiography,” 286.
52. Late in his career, Hare argued that the logic of moral language commits anyone who uses it
unironically to utilitarian conclusions. He insisted, though, that these conclusions could be
rationally avoided by talking differently. See Moral Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981), chapter 1.
Chapter 5
1. I draw in this opening section—indeed, throughout this chapter—on a variety of letters in two
collections of Murdoch’s letters, A Writer at War and Living on Paper (both cited previously),
as well as on Peter Conradi’s Iris (London: W.W. Norton, 2001). Concerning Murdoch’s address
in Brussels: written on the inside of the notebook I mention later, dated October 1945, is the
inscription, “Iris Murdoch Brussels Rue Neuve.” In her first letter from Brussels to her
undergraduate friend Leo Pliatzky, she lists her “home address” as “c/o Agence Continentale et
Anglaise, 32 Rue Picard,” just west of the canal in Molenbeek. The Agence was a travel agency,
though, and appears from a later letter to have been appropriated as a local HQ for the UNRRA.
The notebook address, though not precise, seems likely to have been correct at the time of
writing.
2. Iris Murdoch to Leo Pliatzky, June 17, 1944, in Living on Paper, ed. Avril Horner and Anne
Rowe (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), 37.
3. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, September 4, 1944, in Living on Paper, 38.
4. Iris Murdoch to Leo Pliatzky, October 30, 1945, in Living on Paper, 50.
5. Iris Murdoch to Leo Pliatzky, September 4, 1945, in Living on Paper, 47.
6. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, September 16, 1945, in A Writer at War, ed. Peter Conradi (Short
Books, 2010), 242.
7. W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Vintage, 1991), 179.
8. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, September 16, 1945 in A Writer at War, 237.
9. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, September 16, 1945 in A Writer at War, 237.
10. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, October 4, 1945 in A Writer at War, 244.
11. Iris Murdoch to Leo Pliatzky, October 30, 1945, in Living on Paper, 50.
12. Iris Murdoch to Leo Pliatzky, October 30, 1945, in Living on Paper, 50.
13. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, November 3, 1945 in A Writer at War, 251. I have gathered
incidental details about the talk from coverage in La Lanterne from October 23–25, 1945, from
Catherine Lanneu, L’inconnue Française (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 258–262, and from the
testimony of another attendee, Jacques Taminaux. See “The Phenomenological Movement,” in
Tradition and Renewal, Vol. 3 (1993), 110.
14. A historiographical note: it is commonplace in sketches of Sartre’s life, and of postwar
existentialism, to cite the lecture Sartre gave at the Club Maintenant five days later as the
unveiling of Sartre’s great manifesto. The lecture was soon published as “Existentialism is a
Humanism,” and scholarly introductions routinely point to the Paris lecture as its origin. Perhaps
the published version is closer to the text of the Paris lecture. But as Murdoch’s notes show, the
talk Sartre gave in Brussels was essentially the same, from the early comparison between
Christian and atheistic existentialism to the “parable” (as Murdoch calls it in her notes) of the
young man who approached Sartre for guidance.
15. Iris Murdoch, IML 682, Kingston University Archives.
16. Iris Murdoch, unpublished interview with Richard Wollheim, KUAS 6/6/4/5, Kingston University
Archives.
17. Murdoch, “Midnight Hour,” in Adelphi, January-March 1943, 62.
18. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, January 25, 1946, in A Writer at War, 288.
19. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, undated (probably early 1947), KUAS 100/1/9, Kingston
University Archives.
20. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, November 6, 1945, in A Writer at War, 254.
21. Philippa Foot, interview with Peter Conradi, 1998, KUAS6/4/2/1, audio file held by the Kingston
University Archives.
22. Philippa Foot, interview with Peter Conradi, 1998, KUAS6/4/2/1, audio file held by the Kingston
University Archives.
23. Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, November 6, 1945, in A Writer at War, 255.
24. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, October 10, 1946, in Living on Paper, 83.
25. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, undated, in Living on Paper, 85.
26. Newnham College Archives, AC/5/2/1.
27. It didn’t make Murdoch’s homecoming any easier that she and her father had argued over her
decision to leave the UNRRA. The relief organization was steady employment. See Valerie
Purton, An Iris Murdoch Chronology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 45.
28. Murdoch to David Hicks, November 6, 1945, in Living on Paper, 53.
29. She would later incorporate many observations from her three visits to Malling Abbey into her
novel, The Bell.
30. Conradi, Iris, 243.
31. Newnham College Archives, AC/5/2/10.
32. Conradi, Iris, 258.
33. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, undated, KUAS 100/1/27, Kingston University Archives.
34. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, August 5, 1947, KUAS 100/1/24, Kingston University Archives.
35. Newnham College Archives, AC/5/2/10.
36. Newnham College Archives, AC/5/2/20.
37. Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle (Boston: Little Brown, 1962), 55.
38. Iris Murdoch, Journal 4, October 23, 1947, KUAS 202/1/4, Kingston University Archives.
39. Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle, 55.
40. Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1991), 260–261.
41. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 12, 7.
42. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 241, 88.
43. Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva (Routledge, 2005), 159.
44. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 218.
45. In a single-subject biography, more would have to be mentioned, including at least Raymond
Queneau, Franz Steiner, and Elias Canetti. See Peter Conradi, Iris (London: W.W. Norton,
2001).
46. Iris Murdoch, Journal 4, July 25, 1947, KUAS 202/1/4, Kingston University Archives.
47. Iris Murdoch, Journal 7, June 15, 1949, KUAS 202/1/7, Kingston University Archives.
48. Iris Murdoch, Journal 6, December 13, 1948, KUAS 202/1/6, Kingston University Archives.
49. Iris Murdoch, Journal 6, December 13, 1948, KUAS 202/1/6, Kingston University Archives.
50. Iris Murdoch, Journal 9, February, 1959, KUAS 202/1/9, Kingston University Archives.
51. Iris Murdoch, Journal 6, December 12, 1948, KUAS 202/1/6, Kingston University Archives.
52. Anscombe Papers, Collegium Institute, box 6, no. 212.
53. Iris Murdoch, Journal 7, February 26, 1949, KUAS 202/1/7, Kingston University Archives.
54. Iris Murdoch, Journal 7, March 1, 1949, KUAS202/1/7, Kingston University Archives.
55. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, interview with Peter Conradi, April 17, 1998,
KUAS6/4/1/9 Iris Murdoch archive, Kingston University.
56. Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970),
51–52.
57. Ayer, quoted in Iris Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician,” in Existentialists and Mystics,
ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1999), 105.
58. Murdoch, “The Novelist as Metaphysician,” 105.
59. Iris Murdoch, “The Existentialist Hero,” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (New
York: Penguin, 1999), 110.
60. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (New York: Viking, 1987), 111.
61. Murdoch “The Novelist as Metaphysician,” 50.
62. ”L’Angoisee, snobisme moderne,” May 2, 1950, Murdoch, Talks File I, 1946-1962, BBC Written
Archives Centre.
63. Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics,” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (New
York: Penguin, 1999), 75.
64. “Under the net,” that is, of language. One of Murdoch’s abortive titles for the book gestures
toward the billiard-ball picture that was on her mind throughout this period: “In Solemn Stillness
All.” The reference is to Joseph Addison’s austere eighteenth-century Deist hymn, praising the
Creator of a silent, lifeless mechanism.
65. Living on Paper 169–170.
66. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses” in Philosophical Papers, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 123.
67. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses”, 129.
68. Mehta, The Fly and the Fly-Bottle, 51.
69. Conradi, Iris, 302.
70. Mary Warnock, conversation with author, February 28, 2011.
71. Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’ ” 46.
72. Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau, undated, quoted in Conradi, Iris, 285.

Chapter 6
1. For more on this story, see either Fiona McCarthy, Eric Gill (London: Faber and Faber, 1989) or
Malcolm Yorke, Eric Gill: Man of Flesh and Spirit (London: Constable, 1981), as well as one
of their sources, longtime BBC producer D.G. Bridson’s memoir, Prospero and Ariel: The Rise
and Fall of Radio (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), 41, from which the headmaster’s quote is
taken.
2. The two were involved with several of the same organizations for the promotion of Catholic
social teaching, like the peace organization, Pax. Indeed, Gill was chair of the national Pax
organization in 1939–40, during Anscombe’s most intense period of engagement with the Oxford
Pax group. John Berkman, who has gone more deeply than anyone into Anscombe’s association
with Pax, called this to my attention.
3. This tale is as well-confirmed as any. Nicholas Denyer related that he and some other graduate
students at Cambridge were sitting around with Anscombe one day and began asking whether
this or that legend was true: did she really take off her trousers in a Boston restaurant? “Oh, no,
it was nothing like that!” she said. “It was a bar, and it was in Toronto!” (Nicholas Denyer,
conversation with author, June 29, 2012).
4. A recording of her 1953 broadcast about the life and thought of her mentor Wittgenstein survives
in the BBC Sound Archives (“Ludwig Wittgenstein,” 9 July 1953, BBC Third Programme).
5. Rosalind Hursthouse, correspondence with author, September 6, 2012.
6. Roger Teichmann, conversation with author, July 24, 2012.
7. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Part I, Question 16, Article 5. (Cincinnati: Benzinger
Brothers, 1947)
 8. G.E.M. Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in The Collected Philosophical Works of G.E.M.
Anscombe, Vol. 3: Ethics, Religion, and Politics (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
1981), 61.
9. Conradi, Iris, 283.
10. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Introduction,” in The Collected Philosophical Works of G.E.M.
Anscombe, Vol. 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Minnesota, 1981), viii.
11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (London: Basil
Blackwell, 1958), s. 115.
12. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, s. 309.
13. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Introduction,” in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, viii–ix.
14. G.E.M. Anscombe, Wittgenstein notebook, Box no.7, Fle no. 529, Anscombe Papers, Collegium
Institute.
15. Anthony Kenny, Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher’s Diary (London: SPCK, 2018),
91.
16. G.E.M. Anscombe, Wittgenstein notebook, Box no.7, File no. 529, Anscombe Papers, Collegium
Institute.
17. Elizabeth Anscombe, “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” July 9, 1953, BBC Third Programme, BBC Sound
Archives.
18. Anscombe, notes on Wittgenstein, Box no. 7, File no. 259, Anscombe Papers, Collegium Institute.
“Not house-trained” was Wittgenstein’s dismissive verdict on Anscombe’s abandoned doctoral
thesis. Or this is what he said to her face. In her reminiscences about Wittgenstein, Anscombe
appears to quote him characterizing her work as “shit on the floor,” but adds that “not house-
trained” was “how he put [it] to me.” Luke Gormally suggested to me that “shit on the floor”
was Anscombe’s “translation” of Wittgenstein’s more genteel remark. In any case, that was how
she labeled the file where she stored the thesis. (Luke Gormally, correspondence with author,
December 31, 2020).
19. Anscombe, “The Reality of the Past,” in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, 114n.
20. Philippa Foot, “Obituary of Elizabeth Anscombe”, Somerville College Review (2001), 120.
21. Kenny, Brief Encounters, 91.
22. Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (London: Duckbacks 2002), 65.
23. John Searle, “Oxford Philosophy in the 1950s,” in Philosophy 90 (2015), 180.
24. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 66, 31.
25. Mary Warnock, A Memoir, 65.
26. Searle, “Oxford Philosophy in the 1950s,” 184.
27. Warnock, A Memoir, 68.
28. Max Deutscher, “Some Reflections of Ryle and Remarks on His Notion of Negative Action,” in
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 60 (1982), 254.
29. Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle, 62.
30. Geoffrey Warnock, “Saturday Mornings,” in Essays on J.L. Austin (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973), 33.
31. Conversations with John Lucas (“negative,” “frightening”) (July 18, 2012) and Mary Midgley
(“captious,” “dismissive”) (March 7, 2011).
32. John Lucas, conversation with author, July 18, 2012.
33. Anthony Kenny, conversation with author, July 12, 2012.
34. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (New York: Viking, 1987), 78–79.
35. Mary Warnock, A Memoir, 68.
36. For a fuller account of the debate and its aftermath, as well as relevant background information,
see Christopher W. Mitchell, “University Battles: C.S. Lewis and the Oxford University Socratic
 Club,” in C.S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands, ed. Menuge (Wheaton: Crossway,
1997), 329–352. My remarks on the origins of the Club draw on Mitchell’s account, as well as
from conversation with Jim Stockton.
37. Iris Murdoch, foreword to Stella Aldwinckle, Christ’s Shadow in Plato’s Cave (Oxford: Amate
Press, 1990), 7.
38. C.S. Lewis, Miracles (London: Geofrey Bles, 1947). In the 1960 edition, the title was revised to
“The Cardinal Difficulty of the Naturalist.”
39. Elizabeth Anscombe to Ludwig Wittgenstein, February 3, 1948, Box no. 12, File no. 537,
Anscombe Papers, Collegium Institute. The complete letter appears, together with several other
newly available documents about the debate, in Jim Stockton and Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb, “The
Anscombe-Lewis Debate: New Archival Sources Considered,” in Journal of Inklings Studies
11.1 (April 2021), 35–57. Anscombe may have picked up her taste for vulgarity in Wittgenstein’s
circle, where it seems to have been part of a general atmosphere of “ruthless authenticity.” No
reminiscences from her undergraduate years recount her talking like this. By the late 1940s,
though, it was part of her persona. Anscombe’s daughter Mary Geach Gormally suggested to me
that Anscombe’s vocabulary was influenced by Fowler and Fowler’s The King’s English, with
its counsel to “Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.” (Mary Geach Gormally, correspondence
with author, July 24, 2020). I take the suggestion seriously, but don’t think it explains enough. For
one thing, Anscombe’s crudities were as often Latinate (“bastard,” “piss”) as they were
Germanic. Moreover, a preference for “shit” over “defecate” does not explain a penchant for
bringing excrement into conversation in the first place.
40. Elizabeth Anscombe, “A Reply to Mr. C.S. Lewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is Self-
Refuting,” in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Mind, 225.
41. Elizabeth Anscombe to Ludwig Wittgenstein, February 3, 1948, Box no. 12, File no. 537,
Anscombe Papers, Collegium Institute.
42. A.N. Wilson contended in his biography of Lewis (London: W.W. Norton, 1990) that the
experience put Lewis off Christian apologetics for good. Wilson went so far as to suggest that
the chapter in Lewis’s fantasy novel, The Silver Chair, in which the Green Lady bewitches
Eustace and Jill, befuddling them until they no longer know how to defend obvious truths, is a
recasting of the Socratic Club debate in the mode of nightmare. Critics of Wilson, like Alan
Jacobs in The Narnian (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), observe that Lewis did plenty of
apologetic writing after 1948, and side with Anscombe’s own response to such legends: “I am
inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of [Lewis’s] friends . . . as an
interesting example of the phenomenon called ‘projection’ ” (introduction to Metaphysics and
the Philosophy of Mind, x). But this doesn’t show that Lewis wasn’t humiliated. Nor does
Anscombe’s recollection that they had dinner together at a colleague’s house a few weeks later,
apparently without incident. All it shows is that Lewis could behave himself in the presence of
someone who had vanquished him.
43. Mary Geach, “Introduction,” in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally, eds., From Plato to
Wittgenstein: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2011), xiv.
44. Alex Voorhoeve, “A Mistrustful Animal: An Interview with Bernard Williams,” in Harvard
Review of Philosophy, 12 (2004), 81.
45. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Causality and Determination,” in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of
Mind, 146.
46. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Introduction,” in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Mind, x.
47. Jenny Teichman, “Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, 1919-2001,” in Proceedings of the
British Academy 115 (2001), 34. Teichman attributes this expression to Anscombe and Geach.
 Mary Geach Gormally, though, attributes it to Bernard and Shirley Williams and denies that her
parents used it (correspondence with author, December 13, 2020).
48. My descriptions of life at 27 St. John Street and of Anscombe’s tutorial style are drawn from the
published reminiscences already cited, by Anthony Kenny and John Searle, as well as from
correspondence with Rosalind Hursthouse and Miranda Villiers and conversation and
correspondence with Mary Geach Gormally. Also worth anyone’s time is the newspaper profile
mentioned below (Ann Chesney, “Don, philosopher, and happy mother of six” in The
Manchester Guardian, June 1, 1959), which Rachael Wiseman drew to my attention.
49. Rosalind Hursthouse, correspondence with author, September 6, 2012.
50. Philippa Foot, “Obituary of Elizabeth Anscombe”, Somerville College Review (2001), 120.
51. Michael Dummett, obituary in The Tablet, January 13, 2001.
52. Quoted in Conradi, Iris, 581.
53. John Searle, “Oxford Philosophy in the 1950s,” 181.
54. John Carey, “Down with Dons,” in Original Copy (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 14.
55. John Searle, “Oxford Philosophy in the 1950s,” 181.
56. Jenny Teichman, obituary in The Independent, January 10, 2001.
57. Jimmy Altham, conversation with author, July 31, 2012.
58. Rosalind Hursthouse, correspondence with author, September 6, 2012.
59. Obituary in The Tablet, January 13, 2001.
60. Jane O’Grady, obituary in The Guardian, January 10, 2001.
61. Rosalind Hursthouse notes that she could be gentler with inexperienced interlocutors, showing a
nurturing interest in Hursthouse’s Open University students when she visited their class one
summer. If she judged that someone could handle brutal contradiction, though, she did not restrain
herself. Conversation with author, March 19, 2012.
62. Mary Warnock, A Memoir, 68.
63. Jean Coutts Austin, conversation with author, July 13, 2012.
64. Isaiah Berlin to Anna Kallin, May 9, 1951, in Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960,
ed. Hardy and Holmes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), 229. Berlin had not always felt this
way about Anscombe, or anyway had not always discouraged the BBC from giving her a
platform. According to a note in Anscombe’s file at the BBC Written Archives Centre, he
recommended in late 1950 that Kallin try to secure Anscombe as a broadcaster.
65. Mary Geach Gormally, conversation with author, July 13, 2012.
66. Iris Murdoch, Journal 6, December 13, 1948, KUAS 202/1/6, Kingston University Archives.
67. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 115-16.
68. If this conversation took place in late 1948 or early 1949, when Anscombe and Murdoch’s
friendship was at its most fraught, it adds a layer to the anecdote.
69. C.S. Lewis to Stella Aldwinckle, quoted in Mitchell, “University Battles: C.S. Lewis and the
Oxford University Socratic Club.”
70. Jim Stockton, who is writing a book on the Socratic Club, has a complete index of speakers.
Though Anscombe went on attending, she was not a featured speaker between 1948 and when
Lewis left Oxford in 1954.
71. Mary Midgley, correspondence with author, August 7, 2011.
72. Elizabeth Anscombe to Ludwig Wittgenstein, February 3, 1948, Box no. 12, File no. 537,
Anscombe Papers, Collegium Institute.
73. Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” in Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 65. The minutes of the
Hebdomadal Council, then the chief executive body of the University, record the Vice-
Chancellor’s proposal that if the protest seemed to be gaining traction, he should adjourn the
meeting—but that the Council should do all in their power to make this unnecessary.
74. Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” in Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 65.
75. Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” in Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 70.
76. Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 61.
77. A.E. Harvey to Elizabeth Anscombe, July 18, 1956, BBC WAC RCONT3 Elizabeth Anscombe,
BBC Written Archives Centre.
78. John Lucas, conversation with author, July 18, 2012.
79. As Anscombe wrote of P.H. Nowell-Smith in a letter to the editor of The Listener 1460 (March
21, 1957), 478.
80. Elizabeth Anscombe, “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?,” The Listener 1455
(February 14, 1957), 271.
81. Anscombe, “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?,” 266–267.
82. R.M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 2.
83. R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 78.
84. Anscombe, “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?”, 267.
85. T.S. Gregory to Elizabeth Anscombe, December 5, 1956, BBC WAC RCONT3 Elizabeth
Anscombe, BBC Written Archives Centre.
86. And they had ample reason to respond. In 1957, according to the annual BBC Handbook, The
Listener averaged sales of more 120,000 copies per week.
87. G.E.M. Anscombe, Letter to the Editor, The Listener 1457, (February 28, 1957), 349.
88. T. A. Burkill, Letter to the Editor, The Listener 1459, (March 14, 1957), 427.
89. Anscombe, “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?,” 267.
90. G.E.M. Anscombe, Letter to the Editor, The Listener 1457, (February 28, 1957), 349.
91. R.M. Hare, Letter to the Editor, The Listener 1456 (February 21, 1957), 311.
92. R.M. Hare to T.S. Gregory, January 17, 1957, BBC WAC RCONT1 R M Hare Talks File 1,
1951-1962, BBC Written Archives Centre.
93. R.M. Hare to T.S. Gregory, February 6, 1957, BBC WAC RCONT1 R M Hare Talks File 1,
1951–1962, BBC Written Archives Centre.
94. Elizabeth Anscombe to T.S. Gregory, undated, BBC WAC RCONT3 Elizabeth Anscombe, BBC
Written Archives Centre.
95. G.E.M. Anscombe, Letter to the Editor, The Listener 1459 (March 14, 1957), 427.
96. T.S. Gregory to Elizabeth Anscombe, March 7, 1957, BBC WAC RCONT3, Elizabeth Anscombe
BBC Written Archives Centre.
97. The timing fits. “Modern Moral Philosophy” appeared in the January 1958 issue of Philosophy.
The editor would likely have worked a couple of issues ahead, so the article was probably
submitted by late spring. When it first appeared, it contained a footnote explaining that it had
initially been delivered to the Voltaire Society, a then-popular venue for discussions among
Oxford outsiders: a more secular Socratic. (For more on the Voltaire Society, see John Haldane,
“Anscombe: Life, Action and Ethics in Context,” in Philosophical News (2019).) The talk that
was to become “Modern Moral Philosophy” was probably delivered in late winter or early spring,
then: just after Anscombe’s second script was rejected. Moreover, “Modern Moral Philosophy”
contains numerous one-liners reminiscent of her first script. It reads in places like a broadcast
talk.
98. Many Hume scholars now reject this way of interpreting Hume. See, for instance, Annette Baier,
“Hume’s Own ‘Ought’ Conclusions,” in Pigden, ed., Hume on Is and Ought (Basingstoke,
England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 49–64. But I am concerned with “the history of effects.”
The target of Anscombe’s attack was what we could call the “received reading” of Hume:
received particularly in mid-twentieth-century England.
 99. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Part I, Section I, (Garden City, NY: Dover
Publications 2003).
100. G.E.M. Anscombe, Letter to the Editor, The Listener 1462 (April 4, 1957), 564.
101. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Ethics, Religion, and Politics, 26.
102. Microfilm script, discussion on “The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law,” July 10, 1958, BBC
Written Archives Centre.
103. G.E.M. Anscombe, “Introduction,” in Ethics, Religion, and Politics, vii.

Chapter 7
1. This vignette is based on conversation and correspondence with colleagues and students of
Foot’s, including Lesley Brown, Gaby Charing, Miriam Griffin, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Julie
Jack, but above all Barbara Harvey.
2. Barbara Harvey, correspondence with author, July 24, 2011.
3. Gaby Charing, quoting another student, unpublished memoir.
4. Gaby Charing, unpublished memoir.
5. Rosalind Hursthouse, correspondence with author, January 19, 2012.
6. Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 125.
7. Or it was. The room has recently been refurbished.
8. Foot described these afternoon discussions both in a September 19, 2000 interview with Jonathan
Ree on BBC Radio 3 and in her obituary for Elizabeth Anscombe in the Somerville College
Report (2001), 120.
9. Philippa Foot, journal entry for July 28, 2001, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, with notes toward a BBC
Woman’s Hour profile on Anscombe, Foot Papers, Somerville College Archives.
10. There are conflicting reports about whether Foot was invited to Austin’s Saturday mornings. In a
late interview, she said that women were excluded. But Mary Warnock attended and recalled
Foot being there too. It is noteworthy that no women appear in any of the stories that have come
down about Austin’s “playgroup” (as it was also called). Perhaps Foot received an invitation but,
out of loyalty to Anscombe, (mostly) stayed away. Neither Anscombe nor Murdoch were invited.
11. Barbara Harvey, conversation with author, June 22, 2012.
12. Miranda Villiers, correspondence with author, July 12, 2012.
13. M.R.D. Foot, Memories of an SOE Historian (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2009), 124.
14. Peter Conradi, Iris (New York: Norton, 2001), 169.
15. Mary Warnock, A Memoir (London: Duckbacks, 2002), 52.
16. Alex Voorhoeve, “The Grammar of Goodness: An Interview with Philippa Foot,” Harvard
Review of Philosophy XI (2003), 33.
17. Philippa Foot, interview with Martin Gornall, SC/LY/SP/PF/10, Philippa Foot Papers, Somerville
College Archives.
18. Philippa Foot, “Moral Arguments,” in Virtues and Vices (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), 102–103.
19. In 1948 and 1963, at least. Foot Staff File, Somerville College Archives.
20. In my discussion of Foot’s involvement with Oxfam, I draw on several documents in the Philippa
Foot Papers at Somerville, above all on her lengthy interview with Martin Gornall,
SC/LY/SP/PF/10.
21. Interview with Martin Gornall, SC/LY/SP/PF/10, Philippa Foot Papers, Somerville College
Archives.
22. Interview with Martin Gornall, SC/LY/SP/PF/10, Philippa Foot Papers, Somerville College
Archives.
23. Philippa Foot to Janet Vaughan, January 27, 1947, SC/AO/AA/FW/Anscombe, in Anscombe
Staff File, Somerville College Archive.
24. They may both have been applying for the Mary Somerville Research Fellowship. Anscombe’s
first term was ending that spring, and Foot, as we saw, was seeking more support so that she
could begin to write without compromising her and Michael’s domestic future.
25. Gilbert Ryle to Janet Vaughan, November 10, 1948, SC/AO/AA/FW/Anscombe, in Anscombe
Staff File, Somerville College Archives.
26. If there is any figure with whom Foot would have been associated in the first half-decade of her
career, it wouldn’t have been Aristotle or Wittgenstein, but rather Kant. In the Fall of 1949, when
Foot debuted as a lecturer in Schools, her topic was “Some Problems in Kantian Philosophy.”
And in Murdoch’s journals from the late 1940s, when she recounted a philosophical conversation
with Foot, the subject was almost always Kant.
27. John Campbell, correspondence with author, September 4, 2011.
28. As we saw in chapter 4, Hare, too, was interested early on in “thick” concepts, like “friend.” In a
journal entry for January 28, 1950, Murdoch recounts a talk in which Hare tried to “steer
bet[ween] intuitionism, emotionism & naturalism,” arguing that “Good is both descriptive &
evaluative.” KUAS 202/1/7.
29. Voorhoeve, “The Grammar of Goodness,” 34.
30. Voorhoeve, “The Grammar of Goodness,” 34–35.
31. Voorhoeve, “The Grammar of Goodness,” 35.
32. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 1.
33. R.M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 69.
34. Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 28, (1954), 97.
35. Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 28, (1954), 105.
36. It seems likeliest that she took her sabbatical in Michaelmas term. The Somerville College
Report for 1957 (covering events through December 1957), notes that Foot “has been working in
Oxford on philosophical problems.” That isn’t conclusive, as all three of the College’s 1957
sabbaticals are described in the same tense. But Michaelmas was the only term in which Foot
did not lecture.
37. Voorhoeve, “The Grammar of Goodness,” 35.
38. Mary Geach Gormally, conversation with author, July 13, 2012. Anscombe’s approach to Aquinas
is reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s approach to Kant. Confronting his Hegelian contemporaries,
most of them arrogantly convinced that they had transcended Kant, Kierkegaard deployed
Kantian ideas throughout his writings, but almost never mentioned Kant by name. See Ronald M.
Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1992). It is possible that Anscombe would have recognized and welcomed this
comparison. In her reminiscences on Wittgenstein, she mentions conversations between them
about Kierkegaard and his method of “indirect communication.”
39. An undated letter from Anscombe to Foot, preserved in Foot’s papers at Somerville, conveys the
intensity of their conversations about Aquinas: “It is evident that ‘material object’ means what
we thought. From the Q.D. De Veritate [Disputed Questions on Truth]—But no, I’ll bring it
round! . . . It might be useful to refer to Intention p. 65 . . . to elucidate St. Thos. use of ‘material
object’ . . . or to use St. Thos. to elucidate me!” (file ID SC/LY/SP/PF/12).
40. Voorhoeve, “The Grammar of Goodness,” 35.
41. Philippa Foot, “Immoralism,” BBC Third Programme, September 22, 1957.
42. Foot, “Moral Arguments,” 103.
43. Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” in Virtues and Vices (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 114–
115.
44. Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” 115.
45. Foot, “Moral Arguments,” 107.
46. Miriam Griffin studied with Foot in the late 1950s (later, they became colleagues); her husband
Jasper studied with Hare. Miriam deputized Jasper to ask Hare questions that were really Foot’s,
and vice-versa. Conversation with author, July 23, 2012.
47. Rosalind Hursthouse, conversation with author, March 19, 2012.
48. Anthony Kenny, conversation with author, March 19, 2011.
49. Foot, “Immoralism,” BBC Third Programme, September 22, 1957.
50. Mary Warnock, conversation with author, February 28, 2011.
51. Mary Warnock, A Memoir, 50.
52. Philippa Foot, interview with Jonathan Ree, Twenty Minutes—Philosophical Lives, BBC Radio
3, September 19, 2000.
53. Conradi, Iris, 174.
54. Philippa Foot to Elizabeth Anscombe, February 19, 1964, Box 14, File 580, Anscombe Papers,
Collegium Institute.
55. Peter Conradi, conversation with author, July 20, 2012.
56. Iris Murdoch, Journal 7, October 31, 1949, KUAS 202/1/7, Kingston University Archives.
57. Foot to Vaughan, November 1957, SC/AO/AA/FW/Anscombe, Anscombe Staff File, Somerville
College Archives.
58. Philippa Foot to R.M. Hare, March 24, 1959, in R.M. Hare Papers, Balliol College archives.
59. M.R.D. Foot, Memories of an SOE Historian, 130.
60. Miriam Griffin, conversation with author, July 23, 2012.
61. The letter is undated. Out of touch and outside Oxford, Murdoch seems not to have learned of
the Foots’ separation for several weeks. She records it in her journal on April 29: “Pip & Michael
are parting. This was almost incredible news. I had thought of them as so indissolubly
connected–& somehow of that part of my history concerning them as . . . ended. (How
immediately one falls into egoism.) I feel extremely disturbed. . . . An extraordinary sense of
time rolling backward. And honestly a certain sense of relief at the removal of the barrier
between P & me which M. constituted. I wrote at once to P. saying I sent my old love–& she
replied quickly saying this meant a lot.” (Journal 9, Kingston University Archives,
KUAS202/1/9).
62. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, KUAS100/1/37; drawing (on postcard), Murdoch to Foot,
KUAS100/1/38.
63. Foot Papers, SC/LY/SP/PF/3, Somerville College Archives.
64. Foot, “Moral Beliefs,” 129.
65. Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” in Virtues and Vices (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 167.
66. Philippa Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in Virtues and
Vices (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Chapter 8
1. The opening section draws on Mary Midgley’s memoir, The Owl of Minerva (New York:
Routledge, 2005), but also and especially on conversation and correspondence with her middle
son, David Midgley. There is some imaginative reconstruction in the vignette about the broken
 windowpanes, but I have checked the results with David to make sure it doesn’t contradict his
memory. Source-confirmed details: the time of day, everyone’s locations in the house, David’s
destruction of the two windowpanes with an arch-shaped block, the overheard dialogue on the
homemade radio, the way the boys talked as young children.
2. Geoffrey Midgley collaborated in designing the radar systems that helped hold off the Luftwaffe
in the Battle of Britain.
3. Mary Scrutton, “On Being Reformed,” The Listener 1428, 196.
4. Mary Midgley to Anna Kallin, undated, BBC Written Archives Centre RCONT1, Mary Scrutton
Talks File 1, 1942-1962, BBC Written Archives Centre.
5. Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva (New York: Routledge, 2005), 188.
6. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 189.
7. David Edmonds, Would You Kill the Fat Man? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
8. Radio Times 1707 (July 27, 1956), 36.
9. Iris Murdoch, Journal 6, June 12, 1948, KUAS 202/1/6. Kingston University Archives.
10. Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London: Routledge 2002), xxxv.
11. Midgley, Utopias, Dolphins, and Computers: Problems in Philosophical Plumbing (London:
Routledge, 1996), 1–14. Foot later began using the same comparison.
12. Some readers of Murdoch will be surprised at my linking her to such a project, given the wistful
fascination with which she wrote, starting in the 1960s, about the Platonic Idea of Goodness.
There are crucial differences between her vision and Anscombe’s, Foot’s, or Midgley’s. And the
contribution she made to their work—her diagnosis—would stand, even if she had opposed their
Aristotle-inspired reflections. But the affinity between them goes deeper. Consider one of the
main points in Murdoch’s attack on Sartrian existentialism: that it does not take seriously enough
our nature and its inertia. What does she recommend instead? An inquiry into our nature and its
defects, and into the techniques of attention and habituation that might assist us in overcoming
these defects. In one of her later essays, she praises Freud for appreciating the mechanism of
the human psyche, and suggests that for anyone who takes Freud’s point, the question is how to
reorient and purify our psychic energies “in such a way that when moments of choice arrive we
shall be sure of acting rightly.” See “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” in The Sovereignty of Good. Or
see “Metaphysics and Ethics” in Existentialists and Mystics—in which Murdoch repeatedly
contrasts her own view with what she calls “anti-naturalism.” I do not want to overstate the
affinity between Murdoch and her friends. Murdoch makes no positive use of Aristotle in her
philosophy, in marked contrast to Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley. But neither did her friends have
to reject anything she had said, in developing their Aristotle- and Aquinas-inspired thoughts. And
as I will show, Murdoch was enthusiastically supportive of Midgley’s project as it emerged. I am
grateful to Kieran Setiya for pressing me on this. I suspect I have not satisfied him, but his
objection made me think harder.
13. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 162.
14. Jane Heal, conversation with author, July 31, 2012.
15. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 161.
16. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 168.
17. Midgley, “The Month,” The Twentieth Century 156 (May 1959), 507.
18. Jane Heal, conversation with author, July 31, 2012.
19. Mary Scrutton to Anna Kallin, December 29, 1951, BBC Written Archives Centre. RCONT1,
Mary Scrutton Talks File 1, 1942-1962, BBC Written Archives Centre.
20. Jane Heal, conversation with author, July 31, 2012.
21. David Midgley, correspondence with author, August 3, 2020.
22. Mary Scrutton to Anna Kallin, August 5, 1961, BBC Written Archives Centre RCONT1, Mary
Scrutton Talks File 1, 1942-1962, BBC Written Archives Centre.
23. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 195.
24. Mary Midgley, “A Letter to Posterity,” The Listener, March 27, 1952, 510.
25. Mary Midgley, “A Letter to Posterity,” The Listener, March 27, 1952, 510.
26. Mary Midgley, “A Letter to Posterity,” The Listener, March 27, 1952, 510.
27. This began with her unfinished thesis on Plotinus. Recollecting later, Midgley praised Plotinus for
his attempt “to find a wider, more inclusive perspective which could bring together” the physical
and the spiritual. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva (New York: Routledge, 2005), 157.
28. Mary Scrutton to Anna Kallin, July 17, 1952, BBC Written Archives Centre RCONT1, Mary
Scrutton Talks File 1, 1942-1962, BBC Written Archives Centre.
29. I am grateful to Mary Midgley for lending me this script and for permission to quote it. “Rings
and Books,” unpublished radio script, MID/C/3, Mary and Geoff Midgley Papers, Durham
University Library and Collections.
30. Anna Kallin to Mary Scrutton, June 16, BBC Written Archives Centre RCONT1, Mary Scrutton
Talks File 1, 1942-1962, BBC Written Archives Centre.
31. Midgley, “Bishop Butler: A Reply,” The Twentieth Century 152, no. 95 (July 1952), 61.
32. Interview with Jonathan Ree, Twenty Minutes—Philosophical Lives, BBC Radio 3, September
19, 2000.
33. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 159.
34. Mary Midgley, “Newcastle: Comments on a Case History,” The Twentieth Century 59
(February, 1956), 160.
35. Midgley, “Newcastle: Comments on a Case History,” 160–161.
36. Midgley, “Newcastle: Comments on a Case History,” 161–162.
37. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 188.
38. Stewart Sutherland, “Donald Mackenzie MacKinnon,” Proceedings of the British Academy 97
(1998), 3830–3834.
39. Ernest Gellner, “Reflections on Linguistic Philosophy—I,” The Listener 1480 (August 8, 1957),
205–207.
40. If Gellner thought he was disagreeing with Anscombe: he wasn’t. Anscombe’s thesis, as we saw
in chapter 6, was that Oxford moral philosophy merely channeled the spirit of the age.
41. Ernest Gellner, “Reflections on Linguistic Philosophy—II,” The Listener 1481 (August 15, 1957),
240.
42. Murdoch’s review, “Words and Ideas,” appeared in Volume 27, Number 2 (Spring 1960) of The
Partisan Review, 348–353. The two other epithets are quoted in T.P. Uschanov, “The Strange
Death of Ordinary Language Philosophy,” June, 2006,
https://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/tuschano/writings/strange/. Uschanov’s paper is the most in-
depth discussion one could wish of the Gellner affair and its consequences for Austin’s legacy.
43. Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle (Little, Brown, 1962), 13–14.
44. Gellner, “Reflections on Linguistic Philosophy—II,” 240.
45. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 118.
46. Beyond the Fringe, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUd1OxPbKk4, beginning at 32:45.
47. “The Moral Philosopher’s Job,” BBC Third Programme, broadcast January 19, 1955.
48. Midgley, Beast and Man, xii.
49. Mary Scrutton to Anna Kallin, October 7, 1951, BBC Written Archives Centre RCONT1, Mary
Scrutton Talks File 1, 1942-1962, BBC Written Archives Centre.
50. Mary Midgley, “The Concept of Beastliness,” Philosophy 48, no. 184 (April, 1973), 114.
51. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 191.
52. Midgley, Beast and Man, xxxiii.
53. Midgley, Beast and Man, 50-2.
54. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 71–72.
55. Midgley, Beast and Man, 248.
56. Helmut Gollwitzer, Käthe Kuhn, and Reinhold Schneider, eds., Dying We Live: The Final
Messages and Records of the Resistance (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 51.
57. Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 10.
58. Midgley, Beast and Man, 251.
59. Midgley, Beast and Man, 249.
60. Midgley, “The Concept of Beastliness,” 113.
61. W. David Solomon, conversation with author, May 27, 2014.
62. Andrew Brown. “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” The Guardian, January 13, 2001.
63. Midgley, Beast and Man, xxxiv.
64. Peter Conradi, correspondence with author, November 19, 2010.
65. Rosalind Hursthouse, conversation with author, September 6, 2012.
66. Midgley, “Newcastle: Comments on a Case History,” 162.
67. Mary Midgley, correspondence with author, June 27, 2014.
68. Iris Murdoch to Mary Midgley, undated, MID/E/60, in the Mary and Geoff Midgley Papers at the
Durham University Library and Collections.
69. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, July 28, 1978 in Living on Paper, ed. Horner and Rowe (London:
Chatto & Windus, 2015), 459.

Chapter 9
1. Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics,” in Existentialists and Mystics, 75.
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press,
2007).
3. Andrew Brown, “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” The Guardian, January 13, 2001.
4. As usual, background details on Midgley’s life are drawn from conversation with her and her son,
and on her memoir, The Owl of Minerva (New York: Routledge, 2005).
5. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man (London: Routledge, 1995), 92–93.
6. Midgley, Beast and Man, xvi.
7. Midgley, Beast and Man, 99.
8. J. L. Mackie, “The Law of the Jungle,” Philosophy 53 (October, 1978).
9. As she would write: “in the absence of a serious and realistic psychology of motive, people will
clutch at straws. Moral philosophers, in particular, have so thoroughly and deliberately starved
themselves of the natural facts needed to deal with their problems that many of them are
reduced to a weak state in which they lack resistance to even the most obvious absurdities”
Mary Midgley, “Gene-Juggling,” Philosophy 54 (October, 1979), 458n.
10. Midgley, “Gene-Juggling,” 439.
11. Midgley, “Gene-Juggling,” 449.
12. Richard Dawkins, “In Defense of Selfish Genes,” Philosophy 56, (October, 1981), 556. It did not
help that a journalist who spoke with Midgley and Dawkins about the contretemps reported to
Dawkins—falsely—that Midgley hadn’t read his book. (What Midgley said was that she hadn’t
read the book until well after it appeared.) When Midgley learned that Dawkins had been told
this and was spreading it around, she wrote to him to clarify. He apologized. They met only once,
years later—crossing paths in a stairwell. They had a brief, amicable exchange.
13. He was aggravated too by Midgley’s most insulting remarks. For example, “Up till now, I have
not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel” (“Gene-
Juggling,” 458n).
14. Mary Midgley, “Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism,” Philosophy 58 (July, 1983), 365.
15. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 3.
16. Midgley, Beast and Man, 124.
17. Except as noted, details of Murdoch’s life are drawn from Peter Conradi’s Iris (New York:
Norton, 2001) and Valerie Purton’s An Iris Murdoch Chronology (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
18. Conradi, Iris, 476.
19. David Morgan, With Love and Rage (London: Kingston University Press, 2010).
20. Morgan, With Love and Rage, 143.
21. Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), 56.
22. Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” in The Sovereignty of Good
(London: Routledge, 1970), 84.
23. Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (New
York: Penguin, 1997), 215.
24. Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970),
17–18.
25. Peter J. Conradi, Family Business: A Memoir (Bridgen, Wales: Seren Books, 2019), 181.
26. Conradi, Family Business, 181.
27. Conradi, Family Business, 181.
28. Iris Murdoch, Journal 10, October 27, 1969, KUAS 202/1/10, Kingston University.
29. Iris Murdoch, Journal 10, December 9, 1967, KUAS 202/1/10, Kingston University.
30. Iris Murdoch, Journal 10, May 18, 1968, KUAS 202/1/10, Kingston University.
31. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, early May 1968, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner, eds., Living on
Paper (Chatto & Windus, 2015), 363.
32. Iris Murdoch, Journal 10, October 5, 1968, KUAS 202/1/10, Kingston University.
33. Iris Murdoch, Journal 10, May 3, 1968, KUAS 202/1/10, Kingston University.
34. Peter Conradi passed along to me a copy of the handout he received, accompanying the lectures.
35. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, January 7. 1982, in Living on Paper, 489.
36. Iris Murdoch to Philippa Foot, April 20, 1982, in Living on Paper, 490.
37. Conradi, Family Business, 86.
38. Murdoch, “Sein und Zeit: Pursuit of Being” from Heidegger, in Justin Broakes, ed., Iris
Murdoch: Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 94.
39. Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” 74.
40. Anthony Kenny, conversation with author, March 18, 2011.
41. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (London: Vintage Books, 1999), 512.
42. Conradi, Iris, 589.
43. Conradi, Iris, 588.
44. Iris Murdoch, Journal 15, KUAS202/1/15, Kingston University Archives.
45. Midgley, The Owl of Minerva, 85–86.
46. Peter Conradi, conversation with author, July 20, 2012.
47. Lesley Brown, conversation with author, March 2011.
48. For a deep, nuanced discussion of Anscombe’s unfolding thought on the concept of murder, see
John Berkman, “Justice and Murder: The Background to Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral
Philosophy’,” in Roger Teichmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
49. Anscombe, “Introduction,” in Ethics, Religion and Politics. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1981), viii.
50. Murdoch did send Anscombe tickets to her second play, The Three Arrows, which debuted in
Cambridge in 1972 (Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, interview with Peter Conradi, April
17, 1998, Iris Murdoch archive, Kingston University).
51. Foot referenced the case in her famous article on abortion, the one in which she also introduced
the first trolley case. See “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in
Virtues and Vices (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21.
52. Philippa Foot, journal entry for October 29, 1972, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville
College Archives.
53. Nicholas Denyer, conversation with author, June 29, 2012.
54. Teichman, Jenny. “Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe,” Proceedings of the British
Academy 115 (2001), 37–38.
55. Jimmy Altham, conversation with author, July 31, 2012. Altham had the story from a mutual
colleague.
56. Luke 14:26, New Jerusalem Bible, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1985).
57. Nicholas Denyer, conversation with author, June 29, 2012.
58. Bernard Williams and Michael Tanner, The Human World 9 (November 1972), 42–48.
59. G.E.M. Anscombe, in The Human World 9 (November 1972), 48–51.
60. Philippa Foot, journal entries, December 5, 2000 and January 10, 2001, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1,
Philippa Foot Papers, Somerville College Archives.
61. Gaby Charing, conversation with author, May 14, 2020. It is worth noting that Anscombe was
badly injured the year before in a car accident. Anthony Kenny, who had by then been named
one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors, recalled that she was not the same afterward. But it was
in character for Anscombe to turn on a friend like this over a conflict of convictions. Kenny
himself, for instance: when he left the priesthood and then married without a papal dispensation,
Anscombe told him, “our dearest wish for you must be that you will be desperately unhappy in
your marriage.” They scarcely spoke for the next three decades. (Kenny, Brief Encounters,
94.)
62. Philippa Foot, journal entry for January 10, 2001, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville
College Archives.
63. Journal entries for July 27-28, 2001. SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville College
Archives.
64. Christopher Coope, correspondence with author, September 16, 2012.
65. Christopher Coope, conversation with author, July 21, 2012.
66. Foot, “Obituary of Elizabeth Anscombe,” The Somerville College Record (2001), 119.
67. R.M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” Utilitas 14 (November, 2002), 269.
68. In slightly more detail: to issue a universal prescription is to declare what everyone should do,
every time (that’s what “universally” means) when faced with the situation you’re prescribing
for. But to declare that is to say that everyone should perform that action (call it A) no matter
who is where in the situation. As you consider whether to issue such a prescription, if you’re
being honest with yourself, you must ask, “can I prescribe this if I’m the person doing A? Now
how about if I’m a beneficiary of A? Or if I’m a victim?” To conclude, “yes, I universally
prescribe A for this situation” is to take all of that into account. That is, it is to consider everyone
affected by A and how well satisfied they are by it.
69. R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981), v.
70. Anthony Kenny, conversation with author, March 18, 2011.
71. Anthony Kenny, conversation with author, March 2011.
72. Philippa Foot to R.M. Hare, August 26, 1984, Hare Papers, Balliol College Archives.
73. John Lucas, “A Memoir of Professor R.M. Hare, FBA,” The Balliol College Annual Record
(2002), 32.
74. Catherine Hare, conversation with author, August 1, 2012.
75. Roger Teichmann, conversation with author, July 24, 2012. Rosalind Hursthouse was not present,
but Foot spoke with her beforehand about her intentions.
76. Philippa Foot, journal entry, December 3, 2000, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville
College Archives.
77. Rosalind Hursthouse, correspondence with author, October 18, 2012.
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79. Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
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80. Peter Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 17. Quoted in
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84. Nicholas Denyer, conversation with author, June 29, 2012.
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86. Letter to Manfred Karnovsky, SC/LY/SP/PF/5, Foot Papers, Somerville College Archives.
87. Rosalind Hursthouse, conversation with author, September 6, 2012.
88. Peter Conradi, conversation with author, July 20, 2012.
89. Conradi, Family Business, 176.
90. Peter Conradi, conversation with author, July 20, 2012.
91. Conradi, Family Business, 176.
92. Iris Murdoch, Journal 10, February 17, 1968, KUAS 202/1/10, Kingston University Archives.
93. Philippa Foot, journal entry for July 5, 2003, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville College
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94. Philippa Foot, journal entry for November 7, 1997, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville
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95. Conradi, Family Business, 175.
96. Philippa Foot, journal entry for June 9, 1997, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville College
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97. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., CXIX.
98. Philippa Foot, journal entry for March 15, 1997, SC/LY/SP/PF/6/1, Foot Papers, Somerville
College Archives.
 IMAGE CREDITS

1. Courtesy of Jan Hawthorn.

2. Photo by Laird Parker. Originally published by the British Academy, 1998. Used by permission.
3. Used by kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford.
4. Used by permission of the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford.
5. Photo by Frances White, 2012. Used by permission.
6. Used by permission of Kingston University. File number KUAS164.
7. Public domain. Held by the Austrian National Library. Inventory number Pf 42.805: C (1).
8. Originally published by the British Academy, 2004. Used by permission.
9. Photo by Anna Schilke, 2021. Used by permission.
10. Photo by Anna Schilke, 2021. Used by permission.
11. Photo by Geoff Midgley. Originally published in The Owl of Minerva, by Mary Midgley,
Routledge, 2005. Used by permission of David Midgley.
12. Photo by George Douglas, 1952. Used by permission of Getty Images.
13. Photo by Toblu, 2018. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Senior_Common_Room,_Somerville_College.jpg
14. Photo by Elijah Tangenberg, 2021. Used by permission.
15. Used by permission of Kingston University. File number KUAS100/1/38
16. Used by permission of Kingston University. File number KUAS083/4. Of unknown provenance.
17. Originally published by the British Academy, 2002. Used by permission.
18. Originally published by the British Academy. Used by permission.
19. Used by permission of David Midgley.
20. Photo by Peter Conradi, 1998. Used by permission.
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 INDEX

Addison, Joseph, 290n64

Aldwinckle, Stella, 145, 145n*, 155
Anscombe, Allen, 50–55
Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret (G.E.M.), 40, 48, 281n47, 284n38, 291n3, 294n61
and Aquinas, 54, 87, 138, 167n*, 185–188, 299n38, 299n39
and Aristotle, 89, 164–167, 167n*, 186, 260
and Austin, 142–144, 153, 175, 192
on abortion and contraception, 258–262, 261n*, 169–170
and the BBC, 135–136, 153, 155, 158–164, 169–170
conversion to Catholicism, 50–54, 138–139, 259, 282n5
debate with C.S. Lewis, 145–148, 155, 180, 293n39, 293n42
early life and family, 50–55, 72, 283n36
end of life, 263–264
friendship with Foot, 48–49, 173, 179, 182–185, 193–195, 258–259, 261–264, 299n39
friendship with Midgley, 48–49, 154–155, 203, 210, 258
friendship with Murdoch, 48, 109, 117–125, 130, 252, 254, 306n50
and Hare, 83, 160–169, 192
influence of Wittgenstein, 88, 90, 109, 118–119, 121, 123–124, 139–144, 146, 148–150, 153–154, 169,
174, 179, 185, 197, 216, 263, 292n18
later career, 168–171, 257–259
life at 27 St. John Street, 148–151, 194, 196
marriage to Peter Geach, 88, 137–138, 148, 153, 161, 259, 270, 285n22
and Truman’s honorary degree, 155–158, 162, 186, 260, 295n73
Anscombe, Gertrude Thomas, 51–53
Anscombe, John, 50
Anscombe, Tom, 50
Anselm of Canterbury, 253, 258
Aquinas, Thomas
and early-modern universities, 11
influence on Anscombe, 54, 87, 138, 167n*, 185–188
influence on Foot, 185–188, 191, 198
Aristotle, 238, 260, 279n16, 301n12
influence on Anscombe and Foot, 89, 164–167, 167n*, 180, 186–188, 190–191, 257, 270
influence on Midgley, 205, 214, 218, 220, 224, 260
world picture, 9–12, 14–16
Arnold, Matthew, 19–20, 211
Astor, Nancy, 66
Attenborough, David, 220
Auden, Wystan Hugh (W.H.), 104–105
Austin, Jean Coutts, 40, 48, 72, 153, 283n36
Austin, John Langshaw (J.L.), 44, 85, 147, 153, 175, 220
in contrast with Murdoch, 132–133
and his “Kindergarten,” 143, 174, 192, 217, 235, 297n11
personality, 223, 142–144, 147, 192, 216–217
Ayer, Alfred Jules (A.J.), 47, 171n*
emotivism and anti-naturalist ethics, 41–45, 90–93, 137n*, 266
ongoing influence, 75, 85, 90, 110, 113, 121, 127–128, 142–144, 161–162, 181, 192, 223–224, 245

Bacon, Francis, 12, 14

Badminton School, 33, 60–62, 105
Bain, Ethel, “King,” 60
Baker, Beatrice May, 61–62, 64
Balliol College, Oxford, 33, 77, 86, 95, 221
Balogh, Thomas, 80, 111
Bawden, Nina (Mabey), 26–28, 83
Bayley, John, 62, 130–131, 247, 253, 255–257
Baxter, Jennie, “Nanny,” 68–70, 262
Beauvoir, Simone de, 106–107, 109, 119, 127
Bennett, Alan, 223–225
Bennett, William, 239
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 2–4, 21, 46, 270
Berkeley, George, 257
Berlin, Isaiah, 41, 44, 133, 153, 295n64
Berlioz, Hector, 18
Bernays, Edward, 6–7
Black, Max, 228–229
Boedder, Bernard, 52–54, 73–74, 138–139
Bosanquet, Esther (Cleveland), 67–68, 70, 175
Bosanquet, Marion, 68–70
Bosanquet, Philippa. See Foot, Philippa
Bosanquet, William, 67–68
Bradley, Francis Herbert (F.H.), 254
Broadie, Sarah, 270
Brontë, Charlotte, 129
Brown, Lesley, 257
Browning, Robert, 210
Buchenwald concentration camp, 2–4, 46
Bullock, Alan, 157
Burke, Edmund, 17–18
Burkill, T. Alec (T.A.), 161
Butler, Joseph, 44, 215–216, 218, 220
Byron, George Gordon, 129

Camus, Albert, 105, 127, 188n*

Canetti, Elias, 131, 131n*, 289n45
Carey, John, 150–151
Carroll, Lewis, 60
Cassirer, Heinz, 274
Challoner, Richard, 50–52, 54, 138
Chesterton, G.K., 51, 54
Christ Church College, Oxford, 41, 85
Cobbe, Anne, 1, 23, 71, 177, 196, 275
Collet, Ernest, 105–106
Collingwood, Robin George (R.G.), 254
Conradi, Peter, 47, 59, 193–194, 253–255, 257, 271, 274, 280n1
Cook, Peter, 223–224
Coope, Christopher, 150, 171n*
Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 35–36, 272–273
Coutts, Jean, see Austin, Jean Coutts

Daniel, Norman, 73, 155–156, 285n22

Darbishire, Helen, 27, 35
Darwin, Charles, 219, 232
Dawkins, Richard,
and the “Dawkins sublime,” 1, 17, 43, 92, 97, 128, 167, 255
and The Selfish Gene, 241–244, 304n12, 304n13
Denyer, Nicholas, 260, 291n3
Descartes, René, 12
Diamond, Cora, 270
Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 203
Dodds, Eric Robertson (E.R.), 35, 207
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 45, 80
Dover, Kenneth, 37
Downe House School, 26, 28, 35, 58, 80, 226, 245
Dummett, Michael, 73, 141, 152, 275–276

Edmonds, David, 204

Emmet, Dorothy, 74

Farnell, Vera, 31, 33, 71

Fenner, Rachel, 248
Flew, Anthony, 161, 208
Foot, Michael, 46, 75, 98–101, 111–112, 156, 175–176, 195–196, 268
Foot, Philippa, 298n26, 299n39, 306n51
and Aquinas, 185–188, 191, 198
and Hare, 188–193, 195–196, 198–199, 265–269, 307n78
early life and family, 54–55, 68–71, 175–176
friendship with Anscombe, 48–49, 157–158, 173, 179, 182–185, 193–195, 261–264, 272, 299n39
friendship with Midgley, 172, 199, 204, 213, 233–237, 301n12
friendship with Murdoch, 22–23, 34, 79–83, 110–113, 176, 196, 234, 250–254
influence of MacKinnon, 22–23, 44–48, 71, 172–173, 176–177, 185, 193, 257, 274–275
influence of Wittgenstein, 150, 182–184, 187
legacy and end of life, 270–273, 274–276
marriage to Michael Foot, 1–2, 98–101, 111–112, 175–176, 179, 195–196, 268
relief work, 175, 177–179, 262
return to Oxford after the war, 75, 86–88, 98–101, 177
 at Somerville, 20–21, 39–40, 71, 121, 171–173
Fraenkel, Eduard, 35–37
Franco, Francisco, 44
Freud, Sigmund, 7, 182, 301n12
Friedrich, Caspar David, 128
Froebel Demonstration School, 60
Fromm, Eric, 210

Galilei, Galileo, 13, 15

Geach, Barbara, 88, 262–263, 276
Geach, Peter, 88, 137–138, 148, 153, 161, 259, 270, 285n22
Gellner, Ernest, 221–223, 251–252, 302n40
Gide, André, 181
Gill, Eric, 135–136, 136n*, 291n2
Glover, Mary, 72, 74
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 129
Goodall, Jane, 219–220, 240
Gore, Victoria, 68
Gormally, Luke, 292n18
Gormally, Mary Geach, 150, 212n*, 293n39
Gould, Steven Jay, 19, 240
Gracq, Julien, 105
Gregory, Theophilus Stephen (T.S.), 161–164, 221
Griffin, Jasper, 299n46
Griffin, Miriam, 299n46
Gwyer, Barbara, 72

Hare, Catherine (Verney), 98, 307n78

Hare, Richard Mervyn (R.M.)
and Anscombe, 83, 160–169, 192
early life and family, 96, 98
and Foot, 187–193, 195–196, 265–269
influence of war, 76–79, 96–97, 119–120
later career and end of life, 264–268
marriage, 98
philosophical project, 91, 94–95, 101–102, 133, 165, 183, 188–189, 188n*, 225, 287n52, 298n28,
307n68
post-war return to Oxford, 83–84, 86
Hartley, Mildred, 30, 34–35, 71, 285n21
Harvey, Anthony Ernest (A.E.), 158
Harvey, Barbara, 171, 174–175, 179
Heal, Jane, 210
Heckstall-Smith, Hugh, 168
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 115, 208
Heidegger, Martin, 254
Henderson, Isobel, 35, 36n*
Hicks, David, 48
Hitler, Adolf, 33, 44, 63, 64, 113, 156
Hobbes, Thomas, 41, 48, 73, 215, 279n16
Hobhouse, Christopher, 32–35
Hogg, Quinton, 33
Housman, Alfred Edward (A.E.), 211
Hubbard, Margaret, 131, 157, 248, 251
Hume, David, 41, 146, 164–165, 257, 296n98
Hursthouse, Rosalind, 137, 172, 191, 270, 272–273, 275, 294n61

Ibbotson, Alan, 227

Ibbotson, Eva, 227

Jackson-Cole, Cecil, 177–179

Jacobs, Alan, 293n42
Jerusalem family, 64–65
Jowett, Benjamin, 28

Kallin, Anna, 153, 155, 201–202, 210, 213–215, 227, 295n64

Kant, Immanuel, 44–45, 94, 115, 119, 180–181, 185, 234, 268, 299n38
Keble College, Oxford, 4, 21, 44–46
Kehoe, Richard, 52–53
Kenny, Anthony, 141, 152, 255, 266, 272–273, 306n61
Kepler, Johannes, 15–16
Kermode, Frank, 208
Kierkegaard, Søren, 82, 113, 115, 119, 126, 182, 299n38
King’s College, Newcastle. See Newcastle University.
Kipling, Rudyard, 211
Kneale, Martha, 73–74, 153
Kokoschka, Oscar, 215
Koestler, Arthur, 82, 210
Korsgaard, Christine, 268–269
Kramer, Joseph, 21

Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), Oxford, 23–24, 72, 176

Leibniz, Gottfried, 14
Lenin, Vladimir, 126
Lewis, Clive Staples (C.S.), 145–148, 155, 180, 293n39, 293n42
Lewontin, Richard, 240
Lindsay, Alexander Dunlop (A.D.), 33
Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, 37
Locke, John, 4, 41, 180–181
Lorenz, Konrad, 218–220, 228, 236, 240, 244
Lucas, John, 266, 267

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 238–239

Mackie, John Leslie (J. L.), 241–242
MacKinnon, Donald Mackenzie, 221
cutting ties with Murdoch, 114–116
influence on the four women, 44–48, 99, 109–110, 215, 250–251, 257, 281n47, 284n38
 ongoing help and support, 114, 116–117
MacKinnon, Lois, 114–115
Marcel, Gabriel, 144
Markievicz, Constance, 283n21
Martin, Ann, 207
Marx, Karl, 182
McCune, George, 7
Mead, Margaret, 210
Mehta, Ved, 222
Midgley, Geoffrey, 201n*
marriage to Mary and life with children, 200–203, 206–210
career at Newcastle, 226, 245
Midgley, Mary, 121, 302n27, 304n9
admission to Somerville and early days at Oxford, 25–31, 33–37, 39–40
and Dawkins, 241–244, 304n12, 304n13
early life and family, 54–58, 201
end of life, 246
friendship with Anscombe, 48–49, 154–155, 203, 210, 258
friendship with Foot, 172, 199, 204, 213, 233–237
friendship with Murdoch, 29–32, 33–37, 47–48, 80, 98–99, 98n*, 116, 145n*, 236–237
and MacKinnon, 46–48, 215
return to Oxford after the war, 87, 98–101
marriage to Geoff Midgley and life with children, 200–203, 206–210
and ethology, 203, 226, 244
unusual career path, 199, 203–206, 213, 216–220, 225–227, 239–245
on gender and marriage, 211–215, 271
visit to Austria during Anschluss, 64–65
writings on “Beastliness,” 227–234, 236–237, 239–240
Miller, Jonathan, 223–225
Mitchell, Basil, 131n*, 184, 192
Montaigne, Michel de, 12
More, Thomas, 138
Morgan, David, 248
Moore, Dudley, 223–224
Morse, Horace, 7
Mothersill, Mary, 169
Muir, Mrs., 23, 71
Murdoch, Hughes, 58–61, 281n44
Murdoch, Jean Iris, 145, 285n11
at Somerville, 29–31, 33–37, 39–40, 145
early life and family, 54–55, 58–62
end of life, 256–257
friendship with Anscombe, 48, 117–124, 130, 164, 306n50
friendship with Foot, 22–23, 79–83, 110–113, 176, 196–197, 250–253, 300n61
friendship with Midgley, 29–32, 33–37, 47–48, 80, 98–99, 98n*, 116, 145n*, 236–237
and MacKinnon, 46–48, 114–117, 250–251
leaving Oxford for the Royal College of Art, 130–134, 246, 248–250
marriage to John Bayley, 62, 130–131, 247, 253, 255–257
 post-war period, 87, 98, 103–108, 113–119, 145, 287n1, 289n27
scholarship on French existentialism and British thought, 105–110, 126–130, 160, 255
Murdoch, Irene (Rene) Richardson, 59–61
Murray, Gilbert, 87, 262

Nanny, see Baxter, Jennie

Nagel, Thomas, 271
Newby, Percy Howard (P.H.), 210
Newcastle University, 199, 201n*, 204, 208, 217, 220, 226, 236, 245
Newnham College, Cambridge, 88
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 69, 180–181, 188, 199, 238
Nightingale, Florence, 210
Nineham, Dennis, 45
Nowell-Smith, Patrick Howard (P.H.), 161, 163, 225

Ogden, Charles Kay (C.K.), 91

O’Neill, Onora, 270
Overy, Richard, 63

Plato, 6, 35, 58, 73, 87, 119, 125, 153, 187, 212–214, 224–226, 253–254, 257, 261n*, 301n12
Plotinus, 87, 207, 302n27
Plumer, Eleanor, 116n*
Popov, Linda Kavelin, 239
Price, Anthony (A.W.), 97
Price, Henry Haberly (H.H.), 74, 281n47
Proust, Marcel, 82, 181

Queneau, Raymond, 289n45

Quinn, Warren, 234

Rawls, John, 268

Reith, John, 136
Richards, Ivor Armstrong (I.A.), 91
Riley, Bridget, 248
Rowntree, Jean, 58, 64
Rugby School, 27, 37, 77, 96
Russell, Bertrand, 40, 114, 186, 222
Russell, David, 226–227
Ryle, Gilbert, 41, 131–133, 85–87, 97, 144, 180–181, 181n*, 185, 222, 224

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 106–108, 113, 117, 119, 125, 127–130, 254–255, 269, 287n14, 301n12
Sayers, Dorothy, 30
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 254
Schweitzer, Albert, 63
Scrutton, Leslie Hay, 55–58, 64–65, 202
Scrutton, Mary. See Midgley, Mary
Scrutton, Thomas, 55–58, 64–65, 202
Shakespeare, William, 14, 14n1, 135, 184
Shaw, George Bernard, 54
Shawn, William, 222
Shorten, Monica, 145
Smith, Janet Adam, 210
Smith, Prudence, 127, 155
Smythies, Yorick, 123, 146
Somerville College, Oxford, 22–27, 31, 35, 44, 71, 171–177, 185, 194–195, 270–271
Spengler, Oswald, 63
Stebbing, Susan, 74
Steiner, Franz, 289n45
Stevenson, Charles, 91–94, 100, 127, 181
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60
St. Anne’s College, Oxford, 87, 98, 100, 116n*, 126, 130–131, 207, 246, 248
St. George’s School, Ascot, 68
St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, 25, 25n*
St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, 25, 40, 48, 52, 72, 87–88, 271
Swift, Jonathan, 169–170
Sydenham High School, 51

Tanner, Michael, 260

Taylor, Charles, 17, 271, 279n14
Teichmann, Roger, 268
Tennyson, Alfred, 18–19, 276
Thatcher, Margaret, 244, 245
Thomas, Dylan, 82
Thompson, Frank, 47–48, 81
Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 203, 218–219, 236
Tod, Marcus, 73
Toulmin, Roger, 211
Toynbee, Arnold, 63
Truman, Harry S., 155–158, 162, 186, 260
Turgenev, Ivan, 181

University of Birmingham, 148

University of Cambridge, 24–25, 40–41, 86, 88, 115–119, 139, 169, 257–259
University of Oxford
and degrees for women, 23–32, 271
and WWII, 38–40
post-war changes, 83–86
and mid-century philosophy, 85–87, 131–133, 221–22, 245–246
University of Reading, 100, 204, 207–208

Vane, Rosemary, 68
Vassar College, 113–115
Vaughan, Janet, 89, 114, 177, 179–180, 195
Verney, Catherine. see Hare, Catherine
Verney, Stephen, 98
Villiers, Miranda, 25n*
Waismann, Friedrich, 181
Warnock, Geoffrey, 143–144, 153
Warnock, Mary, 37, 84–85, 90–91, 133, 139–144, 153, 193, 297n11
Weil, Simone, 119, 126, 130, 133, 254
Wells, Herbert George (H.G.), 63
Whitehead, Alfred North, 40
Williams, Bernard, 145n*, 147, 154, 184, 260
Williams, Charles, 58
Williams, Glanville, 169, 171n*
Willis, Olive, 58, 61
Wilson, Andrew Norman (A.N.), 131n*, 293n42
Wilson, Angus, 210
Wilson, Edward Osborne (E.O.), 230, 239–243
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 40, 101, 118–120, 184, 187
and Austin, 142–144, 216
influence on Anscombe, 88–90, 109, 122–124, 139–142, 144, 146–150, 152–155, 164, 169, 174–175,
179, 182, 257, 292n18
influence on Murdoch, 118–120, 129
influence on Foot, 150, 182–184, 187
Woolf, Virginia, 212–213
Wright, Joseph of Derby, 18

Zvegintzov, Diana, 29
PLATES
Figure 1. Philippa Bosanquet (right) with her sister Marion and a pony.
Figure 2. Donald Mackenzie MacKinnon.
Figure 3. Elizabeth Anscombe (back row, right) with friends from St. Hugh’s College in 1938.
Figure 4. Somerville College 1938 matriculation photo (Mary Scrutton first row, fourth from left; Iris
Murdoch second row, fourth from right).
Figure 5. 5 Seaforth Place, aka “Seaforth.” The entrance was through the first opening on the left.
Figure 6. Murdoch on Oxford Street, London, winter 1946-7.
Figure 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Figure 8. R.M. Hare.
Figure 9. 16 Park Town, Philippa and Michael Foot’s home from 1946-1959.
Figure 10. BBC Broadcasting House, with Eric Gill’s statue of Prospero and Ariel.

Figure 11. Geoff and Mary Midgley with sons Martin, David, and Tom, at Runswick Bay, North
Yorkshire, 1959.
Figure 12. J.O. Urmson and J.L. Austin (right).
Figure 13. Somerville Senior Common Room, from the perspective of someone standing in front of the
fireplace.
Figure 14. Front quad, Somerville College. Murdoch’s room was above the gatehouse. Visible on the
right, a building of the Oxford Oratory Church of St. Aloysius Gonzaga (where Anscombe was received
into the Catholic Church).
Figure 15. Postcard from Murdoch to Foot, 1959.
Figure 16. Iris Murdoch.
Figure 17. Elizabeth Anscombe.
Figure 18. Philippa Foot.
Figure 19. Mary Midgley.
Figure 20. Philippa Foot with Iris Murdoch in 1998.