Mary Midgely

From Philosopedia.org

Mary Midgely (13 September 1919 - )

Midgely, who has been described in England's Guardian Unlimited by Andrew Brown as "the most frightening philosopher in [England]: the one before whom it is least pleasant to appear a fool. One moment she sits by her fire in Newcastle like a round-cheeked tabby cat; the next she is deploying a savage Oxonian precision of language to dissect some error as a cat dissects a living mouse

She was born Mary Scrutton in London to Lesley and Canon Tom Scrutton, the chaplain at Kings College, Cambridge. She never undertook obtaining a Ph. D., arguing that it may show you "how to deal with difficult arguments" but it does not "help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context - the background issues out of which the small problems arose."

A moral philosopher at the University of Newcastle upon Tyre before retiring, Midgely opposes reductionist and scientistic philosophies and is concerned with attempts, as she sees it, to make science function as a substitute for the humanities, a role for which she claims it is wholly inadequate.

She has sparred with Richard Dawkins over selfish genes and memes and has also written in favor of a moral interpretation of the Gaia theory.

In The Myths We Live By, Midgely describes myths about science, what is scientific, and what is not. Most have thought-patterns that Descartes and the Enlightenment fostered, she writes, but the Industrial Age modified this and she describes how she thinks such thought-patterns are wrong. To some, she writes opinions. Breaking the world up into parts and then observing them in isolation, she holds, can be disastrous when we try to understand ourselves, our environment, and our relationships with others. Her ideas are so thought-provoking that they anger to the point, others claim, that she makes you thinking about them more thoroughly. The book included,

• It turns out that the evils which have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of.
• In exposing these rhetorical attempts to turn science into a comprehensive ideology, I am not attacking science but defending it against dangerous misconstructions

As described by The Guardian Unlimited,

• The ideas she considers really substantial are those which deal with Aristotelean questions: how should men and women live (not that Aristotle had any interest in women's lives), and she has little time, or inclination for more Platonic interests in pure logic or ultimate reality. In Science And Poetry she writes, "Any major kind of philosophising always presents some distinctive ideal for life as well as for thought because life and thought are not really separate at all, and if the contemporary academic philosophers suppose they are not doing this they are mistaken. Academic narrowness is a style of thought as much as any other. It is quite as easily conveyed by a style of writing, and even more easily by a style of teaching.
• [Noting that so much is wrong with the human race, she laments that the humanists and sociologists] who believed that human nature was either uninteresting or non-existent; and that if it did exist, it could be moulded into any shape we wanted. One place where this was a real problem was feminism: the question do women differ from men only in the position of their dangly bits, or in their hearts and minds too, is not purely academic. Science, philosophy and ethics all can help to solve it, but that is not what makes it urgent. It's interesting because it is a question that everyone must solve in their own lives, and which various academic disciplines can help them to solve. Those have always been the kind of questions that interest Midgley.

In 1950, she married Geoffrey Midgley and had three sons. At the time of their marriage, she wrote,

• The dominant philosophical line at Oxford at that time was a refined kind of logical positivism. But there were also present highly metaphysical people like Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. So there was a very great deal of argument. Someone brought him round to my rooms in Park Town at about 11 o'clock one morning, and we were still arguing at six that evening. But what impressed him was that I had produced a pork pie and a tin of spaghetti to enable the argument to continue.

He died in 1997. She lives near the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where she and Geoffrey both taught for years.

An atheist who rejected Christianity in her teenage years, she staunchly defends the need for something like religion:

• It is absurd to talk as if religion consisted entirely of mindless anxiety, bad cosmology, and human sacrifice. . . . People are naturally ceremonial, ritualistic, and naturally inclined to find purposes in things. If these impulses are not brought together and disciplined, you get something even worse than organised religion. I feel this about the Guardian's anti-royal campaign. If you don't have your ceremonial life centred on royalty, you've got it centred on pop stars, and that's worse. It's all a matter of the lesser evil. . . . For all the obvious difficulties about believing in God, or in anything else that might answer our prayers, Midgley points out that prayer has been immensely important in history: "People have achieved the most amazing things by putting their trust in providence, or indeed by praying. They were not thinking about the virgin birth or the atonement when they did that. But they were thinking in a way that does seem central to human effort. I think it is reasonable to say that one can think that way with respect to the creation as a whole. All the formulations that one makes about this have something wrong with them, and it is very easy to say that there is something wrong with them; but that is not to say that we can live without the religious attitude."

Books

Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978; revised edition 1995)

Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (1981)

Animals And Why They Matter (1983)

Evolution as a Religion (1985, reprinted with new introduction 2002)

Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What Is Knowledge For? (1989)

Science As Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (1992)

The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (1994)

Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems of Philosophical Plumbing (2000)

Science And Poetry (2001)

Myths We Live By (2003)

The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir (2005, an autobiography)