Oct 17, 2018 06:51 PM
http://dailynous.com/2018/10/15/thinking...ames-kidd/
EXCERPT: Mary Beatrice Midgley died last week, aged ninety-nine, after a sixty-nine career as lecturer, researcher, and respected and admired public intellectual. She was the last living member of a remarkable group of British women philosophers, whose other members were Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Philippa Foot—a group whose intermingled lives and careers are explored by the In Parenthesis project, based jointly at the Universities of Durham and Liverpool.
[...] Mary was at her best when engaged in her determined efforts to expose and combat various efforts to “narrow” our visions and imagination. Across her most famous books, the bête noires were broad ‘isms’, such as reductionism and scientism: their titles often announce the target—Evolution as a Religion, Science as Salvation, or The Solitary Self, an attack on ‘social atomism’.
Other books focus on her positive theses, such as Animals and Why They Matter—radical, at the time, for affirming that they do—and Science and Poetry. Unlike some attacks on these ‘isms’, Mary preferred to target their specific forms, using the big-picture perspective to approach recent or emerging problems. This is the strategy of her first book, Beast and Man, which appeared in 1978, at the height of the sociobiology debate spurred by E.O. Wilson. Immersed in ethology and other sciences, Mary’s criticisms were met as a welcome alternative to extravagant, overexcited talk of finally replacing ethics with biology.
Some critics painted her as anti-scientific, although anyone who reads her sees that isn’t at all true. Sciences have an important role to play in studying human nature, but aren’t the only stars of the show—a fact we forget or ignore at our peril. Subsequent work by philosophers of science endorsed this pluralism, and I’m always struck by how ahead of the game Mary’s views on science were. (Think of her prescient emphasis on the pluralistic, disunified, value-charged nature of the sciences, which came to be a major theme of 1990s philosophy of science.) Although she always described herself as a moral philosopher, though she was also a full-time philosopher of science, even if few of them read or know her work.
The same impulse to rescue complexity from abstraction is also the abiding theme of Mary’s work on animal ethics. A lot of work on non-human animals tends to ignore or downplay our actual relations to animals, which jeopardises our ability to grasp fully why they matter morally. Some are pets, some pests, some ‘companions’—terms that register a range of subtly textured forms of affective, personal, and cultural significance. Trying to theorise about animals means attending to our actual relationships with them, not talking grandly but vacuously of their moral ‘rights’ and ‘status’.
[...] Much of Mary’s work is characterised by a patient, almost plodding determination to steer clear of the dramatism of dogmatism, to stay close to what actually goes on, to try to restore calm to an overexcited arena. Let’s employ abstraction, but only as long as we remember to go back and restore what we had to take out in order to get started. Attend to the small details, but step back, at least at times, to look at the big picture.
It is this moderate, pragmatic, careful spirit that is most characteristic of Mary’s work. We can see it in her earliest article, although it’s at its clearest in her books, where she had space to explore a theme across its different aspects. She was born to write books, even if she waited a long time to start writing them [...] Luckily for us, once she got going, she wasted no time in saying what she thought. In the thirty-year eight years since her retirement, she wrote over two hundred books, articles, and chapters, for philosophy journals and environmental magazines, for New Scientist (for whom she was the go-to philosopher), and for The Guardian and the UK’s newsstand magazine, Philosophy Now. (You can find a full bibliography of her works here).
[...] Mary retired from Newcastle in 1980, aged sixty-one, and the department was closed after an enforced battle for survival with the Department of Music. ‘Retire’, though, seems the wrong word. The survivors of the department formed a discussion group, APIS—the Applied Philosophy Ideas Section—whose would meet at Mary’s home in Jesmond on Wednesday evenings. I spoke there a couple of times, well-supplied with tea and biscuits, among philosophers, poets, artists, and interested and interesting others. Mary would hold court, eyes tight shut in thought, concentrating through a furrowed brow, her questions afterwards invariably always straight to the point, often prefaced by a favourite line, “There’s a lot of muddled thinking, here…”
Many philosophers are rightly impressed that she remained so philosophically active, even as an advanced nonagenarian. An astonishingly prolific writer, she was still working the day she died, having just finished a new book. Much of Mary’s reputation as a public philosopher is due to her clear and accessible philosophical writing. [...] Unlike the ponderous tone of some philosophy books written for the public, her writing is crisp and clear, with an attractive economy and lightness of style coupled to a talent for apt images and metaphors.
[...] I suspect some people underrate her work because of its readability. It’s easy for academically trained readers to mistakenly think that simplicity of style can’t mean depth of thinking. It’s of course possible, if difficult, to think and write well at the same time—to achieve rigour, without rigor mortis. Mary did it exceptionally well, marked by her characteristic virtues of modesty, good sense, straightforwardness, and a pleasing sardonic wit—not to mention her tenacity, precision, and unwillingness to suffer fools.
[...] Mary’s work was, in a sense, a continuous effort to point out [...] injurious tendencies. We’re at constant risk of lapsing into dogmatism, rigidity, simplification. Simple stories travel faster. Easier explanations are easier to sell. It therefore takes real effort to keep bringing oneself back to the complexity of the world, to attend to “actual arrangements”, to step back and look at the big picture.
Throughout her writing, we are offered a vision of philosophy as one way—or a set of ways—for trying to help us resist the “narrowing” of our hearts and minds. If done well, we are reconnected with those profound goods celebrated in the titles of her books—the varieties of moral experience, the myths we live by, and science and poetry.
But philosophy can be corrupted, until it cuts itself off from everyday experience and human relationships and the arts and the sciences. It’s therefore fitting that Mary gave us a crisp statement of a richer, soberer vision of philosophy in her most recent published book, What Is Philosophy For?, published this year by Bloomsbury:
MORE: http://dailynous.com/2018/10/15/thinking...ames-kidd/
EXCERPT: Mary Beatrice Midgley died last week, aged ninety-nine, after a sixty-nine career as lecturer, researcher, and respected and admired public intellectual. She was the last living member of a remarkable group of British women philosophers, whose other members were Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Philippa Foot—a group whose intermingled lives and careers are explored by the In Parenthesis project, based jointly at the Universities of Durham and Liverpool.
[...] Mary was at her best when engaged in her determined efforts to expose and combat various efforts to “narrow” our visions and imagination. Across her most famous books, the bête noires were broad ‘isms’, such as reductionism and scientism: their titles often announce the target—Evolution as a Religion, Science as Salvation, or The Solitary Self, an attack on ‘social atomism’.
Other books focus on her positive theses, such as Animals and Why They Matter—radical, at the time, for affirming that they do—and Science and Poetry. Unlike some attacks on these ‘isms’, Mary preferred to target their specific forms, using the big-picture perspective to approach recent or emerging problems. This is the strategy of her first book, Beast and Man, which appeared in 1978, at the height of the sociobiology debate spurred by E.O. Wilson. Immersed in ethology and other sciences, Mary’s criticisms were met as a welcome alternative to extravagant, overexcited talk of finally replacing ethics with biology.
Some critics painted her as anti-scientific, although anyone who reads her sees that isn’t at all true. Sciences have an important role to play in studying human nature, but aren’t the only stars of the show—a fact we forget or ignore at our peril. Subsequent work by philosophers of science endorsed this pluralism, and I’m always struck by how ahead of the game Mary’s views on science were. (Think of her prescient emphasis on the pluralistic, disunified, value-charged nature of the sciences, which came to be a major theme of 1990s philosophy of science.) Although she always described herself as a moral philosopher, though she was also a full-time philosopher of science, even if few of them read or know her work.
The same impulse to rescue complexity from abstraction is also the abiding theme of Mary’s work on animal ethics. A lot of work on non-human animals tends to ignore or downplay our actual relations to animals, which jeopardises our ability to grasp fully why they matter morally. Some are pets, some pests, some ‘companions’—terms that register a range of subtly textured forms of affective, personal, and cultural significance. Trying to theorise about animals means attending to our actual relationships with them, not talking grandly but vacuously of their moral ‘rights’ and ‘status’.
[...] Much of Mary’s work is characterised by a patient, almost plodding determination to steer clear of the dramatism of dogmatism, to stay close to what actually goes on, to try to restore calm to an overexcited arena. Let’s employ abstraction, but only as long as we remember to go back and restore what we had to take out in order to get started. Attend to the small details, but step back, at least at times, to look at the big picture.
It is this moderate, pragmatic, careful spirit that is most characteristic of Mary’s work. We can see it in her earliest article, although it’s at its clearest in her books, where she had space to explore a theme across its different aspects. She was born to write books, even if she waited a long time to start writing them [...] Luckily for us, once she got going, she wasted no time in saying what she thought. In the thirty-year eight years since her retirement, she wrote over two hundred books, articles, and chapters, for philosophy journals and environmental magazines, for New Scientist (for whom she was the go-to philosopher), and for The Guardian and the UK’s newsstand magazine, Philosophy Now. (You can find a full bibliography of her works here).
[...] Mary retired from Newcastle in 1980, aged sixty-one, and the department was closed after an enforced battle for survival with the Department of Music. ‘Retire’, though, seems the wrong word. The survivors of the department formed a discussion group, APIS—the Applied Philosophy Ideas Section—whose would meet at Mary’s home in Jesmond on Wednesday evenings. I spoke there a couple of times, well-supplied with tea and biscuits, among philosophers, poets, artists, and interested and interesting others. Mary would hold court, eyes tight shut in thought, concentrating through a furrowed brow, her questions afterwards invariably always straight to the point, often prefaced by a favourite line, “There’s a lot of muddled thinking, here…”
Many philosophers are rightly impressed that she remained so philosophically active, even as an advanced nonagenarian. An astonishingly prolific writer, she was still working the day she died, having just finished a new book. Much of Mary’s reputation as a public philosopher is due to her clear and accessible philosophical writing. [...] Unlike the ponderous tone of some philosophy books written for the public, her writing is crisp and clear, with an attractive economy and lightness of style coupled to a talent for apt images and metaphors.
[...] I suspect some people underrate her work because of its readability. It’s easy for academically trained readers to mistakenly think that simplicity of style can’t mean depth of thinking. It’s of course possible, if difficult, to think and write well at the same time—to achieve rigour, without rigor mortis. Mary did it exceptionally well, marked by her characteristic virtues of modesty, good sense, straightforwardness, and a pleasing sardonic wit—not to mention her tenacity, precision, and unwillingness to suffer fools.
[...] Mary’s work was, in a sense, a continuous effort to point out [...] injurious tendencies. We’re at constant risk of lapsing into dogmatism, rigidity, simplification. Simple stories travel faster. Easier explanations are easier to sell. It therefore takes real effort to keep bringing oneself back to the complexity of the world, to attend to “actual arrangements”, to step back and look at the big picture.
Throughout her writing, we are offered a vision of philosophy as one way—or a set of ways—for trying to help us resist the “narrowing” of our hearts and minds. If done well, we are reconnected with those profound goods celebrated in the titles of her books—the varieties of moral experience, the myths we live by, and science and poetry.
But philosophy can be corrupted, until it cuts itself off from everyday experience and human relationships and the arts and the sciences. It’s therefore fitting that Mary gave us a crisp statement of a richer, soberer vision of philosophy in her most recent published book, What Is Philosophy For?, published this year by Bloomsbury:
Philosophising, in fact, is not a matter of solving one fixed set of puzzles. Instead, it involves finding the many particular ways of thinking that will be the most helpful as we try to explore this constantly changing world. Because the world—including human life—does constantly change, philosophical thoughts are never final. Their aim is always to help us through the present difficulty.
With the sad death of Mary Midgley, we are deprived of a wise, sensible, very humane philosopher....MORE: http://dailynous.com/2018/10/15/thinking...ames-kidd/