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Obituary for Mary Midgley: Thinking as complex as the world

#1
C C Offline
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/
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#2
Yazata Offline
Ninety-nine years old! And writing to the end. Impressive.

She reminds me of Ernst Mayer, the evolutionary biologist who made it to 100 and was active to the end, publishing his last book at age 99.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mayr

(Oct 17, 2018 06:51 PM)C C Wrote: 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.

There are no end of female philosophers today in British academia, but they all seem to be lightweights compared to this older generation of formidable women and of comparatively little significance. (Can anybody name a contemporary British female philosopher off the top of their head?) Perhaps that's because back when these older women started these careers, while there wasn't a whole lot of active discrimination, there weren't any gender preferences either. They had to establish reputations the old-fashioned way.

One of my old professors had been a former student of Peter Geach at the U. of Leeds, and hence knew Elizabeth/G.E.M. Anscombe (her first name was Gertrude and she didn't like it, preferring her middle name), who was Geach's wife. My professor remembered them as having a peculiar long distance relationship (they taught at different universities) and her as having a peculiar dry and ascerbic sense of humor. (She would show her fondness for somebody by putting them down with sarcasm.) Maybe that's a British thing.

But back to Mary...  

Quote:[...] 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’.

I can easily relate to that. My own motivations are much the same (on a far more amateur level). That's what motivates many of my posts over on the other board and it's why I find myself defending MR over there. It's why, despite my being an atheist myself, I challenge the smug atheist certainty and the often rather faith-based scientism. In my view that ignores a host of important unanswered metaphysical and epistemological questions.    

Quote: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.

I suspect that we are seeing a bit of this obituary writer's own opinions sneaking in with those words.

Quote: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.

I don't understand that. If the Newcastle philosophy department was closed in 1980, it seems to have been subsequently resurrected. But while the stone has been rolled away from the tomb, it isn't a particularly impressive philosophy department these days either. Maybe it did have a near-death experience back in the day.

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/philosophy/postgra...programmes

Quote:‘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…”

So whatever happened to the Newcastle philosophy department in the 1980's, Midgeley and her crowd (forced out by academic politics?) seem to have taken on the style of French cafe philosophers, except holding court English-style with "tea and biscuits" instead of coffee and cigarette smoke. The same sort of "philosophers, poets and artists" mix. (The 1940's and 50's Parisians favored jazz musicians too.)

I kind of like it, and still remember the Fundamental Fysiks Group that used to meet at the Cafe Trieste in San Francisco. (Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for the Godfather at a table in the same cafe around the same time.) Unfortunately philosophy (or physics!) conducted in this manner often becomes soft, flaccid, incoherent, overly literary and a bit stream-of-consciousness (especially when it's lubricated by LSD). The informal style of academic life seems more conducive towards "continental" than "analytic" philosophy, I guess. (It's produced no end of trendy French theorists.) More impressionism than intellectual discipline. As Mary might have said, "lots of muddled thinking here". Kind of fun, though.

Maybe it's better to stick with tea and biscuits, and lay off the expresso (and the psychedelic drugs). Maybe part of Mary's wise common sense compared to the excesses of this kind of free-form intellectual life was the result of her upbringing and her British cultural context as much as anything. And to the fact that these meetings were held in her home and presumably were invitation only, as opposed to held in public spaces and composed of whoever showed up.

Quote: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.

Impresses me.
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#3
C C Offline
(Oct 18, 2018 07:52 AM)Yazata Wrote:
Quote: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.

I don't understand that. If the Newcastle philosophy department was closed in 1980, it seems to have been subsequently resurrected. But while the stone has been rolled away from the tomb, it isn't a particularly impressive philosophy department these days either. Maybe it did have a near-death experience back in the day. https://www.ncl.ac.uk/philosophy/postgra...programmes

[...] So whatever happened to the Newcastle philosophy department in the 1980's, Midgeley and her crowd (forced out by academic politics?) seem to have taken on the style of French cafe philosophers, except holding court English-style [...]


Ian James Kidd blames the closures of departments (going beyond just philosophy) at various institutions at the time on the Thatcher administration's war on "useless research" in universities. But it sounds like a range of British philosophers themselves were snobbishly indifferent and disparaging to Newcastle's plight: "...philosophy was only worth doing if done well, which clearly wasn’t possible in the north-east of England. (Some years later, David E. Cooper pointed out that many of the politicians and civil servants who presided over these closures would have done PPE at Oxford in the ‘50s and ‘60s, where their tutors taught them—too well, it seems—that philosophy was ‘useless’)." Of the big-name philosophers, only A.J. Ayer answered Midgley's call for support.

Margaret Thatcher was originally a chemist, but a STEM and scientism agenda wasn't the reason for so-called "impractical" higher learning pursuits winding up on the short end. It was her economic policy which reduced tax payer funding and forced educational programs to compete with each other slash prove their worth.[1]

I'm not sure, either, when Newcastle got its philosophy department back or got it back more fully as a shadow of its former self -- whether sometime after Thatcher was forced out as Party leader / PM in 1990 or during a latter period of her former reign. The fact that her economic philosophy in that area still has impetus to this day kind of made her presence / absence afterwards seem like an irrelevant factor for Newcastle and the rest (in terms of lost or weakened disciplines being revived). For instance, general announcements made back in 2009 sounded like a repeat in spirit of early '80s intent or side-effects of policy.[2]

- - - footnotes - - -

[1] Margaret Thatcher’s Legacy Divides British Higher Education: . . . Buckingham’s current vice chancellor, Terence Kealey, praises Thatcher for introducing the sector “to greater accountability and to market forces.”

Indeed, higher education was where, as prime minister, Thatcher made an early push toward privatization. In 1981, two years into her premiership, Thatcher cut government funds for universities by nearly 20 percent. Thus began that journey, once described by the French philosopher Paul Valéry as a crisis of the spirit in which Knowledge, reduced to a market commodity, becomes subservient to Commerce. For some, this is a positive aspect of the legacy; but for many in higher education, this is precisely the inheritance that is to be rejected.

The commercialization of the sector has been much extended since; and, at the time of Thatcher’s death, it is probably the key area of contention and debate about the place and idea of the university in our times, in Britain and beyond. In England, it has led to larger costs for students and a push to value academic research based almost entirely on its economic benefit.


[2] 'Pointless' university studies to be weeded out by new government panel (2009): The government is to stop funding "pointless" university research, forcing academics to prove that their academic inquiry has some relevance to the real world, funding chiefs will announce today. Universities will have to show that their research influences the economy, public policy or society in order to secure the biggest research grants, the government's funding body for higher education said.

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#4
Yazata Offline
(Oct 18, 2018 08:32 PM)C C Wrote:
(Oct 18, 2018 07:52 AM)Yazata Wrote:
Quote: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.

I don't understand that. If the Newcastle philosophy department was closed in 1980, it seems to have been subsequently resurrected. But while the stone has been rolled away from the tomb, it isn't a particularly impressive philosophy department these days either. Maybe it did have a near-death experience back in the day. https://www.ncl.ac.uk/philosophy/postgra...programmes


Ian James Kidd blames the closures of departments (going beyond just philosophy) at various institutions at the time on the Thatcher administration's war on "useless research" in universities. But it sounds like a range of British philosophers themselves were snobbishly indifferent and disparaging to Newcastle's plight

I'm more inclined to suspect that Kidd's story of the Newcastle philosophy department closing isn't true. I don't know what happened, maybe some layoffs and Midgely took an early retirement. But the department is most emphatically still there.

These days, the Newcastle philosophy department seems to have a decidedly 'continental' orientation. It isn't one of Britain's better philosophy departments. (And no, not because it's in northeast England or because it has a cool damp climate, either.)

https://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/overall-rankings/

There is a legitimate issue here though. Does the UK really need philosophy programs at so many universities? Or might it make sense to close the weaker ones and then move whatever philosophical stars might be working at those places to further strengthen the stronger departments?

Part of Britain's problem is the way that British higher education is structured. In Britain, a university isn't truly considered a university unless it offers PhD programs. So they have 100+ state-funded doctoral research universities trying to occupy the same space as the 10 University of California campuses. (Britain has maybe 60 million people, California has 40 million, so a comparable number of state-funded doctoral-research universities per population might be 15.) So the way the British system is organized, their universities are almost guaranteed to be underfunded in comparative terms. The system needs rationalization (in the business sense).

Similar arguments can even be made here in California. Eight of the ten University of California campuses have philosophy doctoral programs. (In addition to private universities like Stanford, USC, Claremont...) But does California really need 8 state-funded philosophy doctoral programs? Are there really enough philosophy teaching jobs out there to absorb their graduates? Is there really such a large unmet need for philosophers? Or are all these programs just glutting the market with lots of often second-rate philosophers? Perhaps they should close the weaker half of these departments, consolidating down to four, which would absorb the more prominent faculty and better students from the others.
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#5
C C Offline
(Oct 19, 2018 01:29 AM)Yazata Wrote: I'm more inclined to suspect that Kidd's story of the Newcastle philosophy department closing isn't true. I don't know what happened, maybe some layoffs and Midgely took an early retirement. But the department is most emphatically still there.

These days, the Newcastle philosophy department seems to have a decidedly 'continental' orientation. It isn't one of Britain's better philosophy departments. (And no, not because it's in northeast England or because it has a cool damp climate, either.)

Here are two different obit writers below who also claim Newcastle's Phil Dept closed down -- one apparently a student there, back then. Unfortunately any newsletters that the university might have issued in 1980 through 1981, which might finally settle the question, are difficult to find PDFs of online or are behind paid firewalls or are non-existent as historical records. If the demise did occur, a weak substitute like these "Philosophical Studies" would be bound to return sometime in the decades since. (Perhaps, again, before Thatcher's era was even over. Or if a cheap enough replacement, as quickly as '82 to '85.)

GILES FRASER: But there I met the Midgleys, Geoff and Mary – both considerable philosophers, and both with an extraordinary gift for inspiring wayward students. Under their care, I grew up. And graduated with a passion for philosophy and stamped forever by the desire to join the dots between abstract thought and real life. The Midgleys turned me around.

Mary and Geoff had an open house for the mixed bag of students that came within their orbit. Teaching and pastoral care and philosophy all blended together, creating an astonishing sense of solidarity amongst us all. I was the last of this generation – the University closed the philosophy department the year I left. It wasn’t financially viable, they said. It broke the Midgley’s hearts. Geoffrey passed away a few years later. Mary died last week, aged 99.
(LINK)
- - -
ANDREW MCKIE: Her own academic career was interrupted by her marriage, in 1950, to Geoffrey Midgley, who taught at the University of Newcastle, where she settled and raised their three sons. In 1962 she joined her husband in the philosophy department there, eventually becoming senior lecturer, and retiring in 1980, shortly before the department closed. (LINK)


Quote:There is a legitimate issue here though. Does the UK really need philosophy programs at so many universities? Or might it make sense to close the weaker ones and then move whatever philosophical stars might be working at those places to further strengthen the stronger departments? [...] the way the British system is organized, their universities are almost guaranteed to be underfunded in comparative terms. The system needs rationalization (in the business sense).

Coincidentally, the Newcastle University in Australia (no relation to England's) had a big ado / outrage last year over "plans to scrap philosophy, ancient history and classical languages as study majors and 'decimate' their staff." But it doesn't look like a gutted version or redesign project yet:  Why a PhD or Research Masters in Philosophy & Religion at Newcastle?

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