THE WOMEN WHO CHALLENGED PLATO
Metaphysical Animals Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman Chatto & Windus €21 ★★★★★
In 1956 a tall, untidy-looking woman stood before the ruling body of Oxford University. The powers that be had gathered to rubber-stamp the decision to give an honorary degree to Harry S Truman, the 33rd president of the US. Mr Truman, agreed the male dons, had fought a good war. But the tiny handful of women who were entitled to vote didn’t agree. This, after all, was the person who had signed the order for nuclear bombs to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Far from being a hero, he was, to their way of thinking, no better than a war criminal.
The woman was Elizabeth Anscombe and, together with three female friends, all Oxford-trained philosophers, she made it her life’s work to reintroduce morals into the increasingly arid and theoretical practice of philosophy. This terrific book argues that it was Anscombe, together with Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch (above) and Philippa Foot, who dragged the ancient metaphysicians Aristotle and Plato from their pedestals and made them relevant to a post-war world. The question these women were asking sounded naive, but resonates louder than ever today: how do I live a good life in a world where so much unimaginable wickedness lies beyond my control?
This makes Metaphysical Animals sound heavy, but it is actually a joyous story of four clever young women making their way in the world.
Foot was the granddaughter of US president Grover Cleveland. She was close friends with, and occasional lover of, Murdoch, who later became famous as a novelist but at this point was a permanently slightly drunk flirt to whom male philosophers felt compelled to propose. Midgley was a vicar’s daughter who worried that her height and her glasses meant no man would ever want her (in fact she ended up in a happy marriage). Anscombe insisted on wearing trousers as part of her academic dress, until she reached a compromise whereby the university gave her a skirt to wear for delivering lectures.
Metaphysical Animals follows this charismatic quartet as they plot to overturn the moral relativism of male colleagues who argue that there is no such thing as good or bad, merely selfinterest. For these women this simply will not do. They want, in Foot’s words, to be able to look the Nazis in the eye and say, ‘But we are right, and you are wrong’. The result is a group biography that is both gossipy and gripping but also, like the women themselves, profoundly serious. A triumph.