Metaphysical Animals by Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

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Metaphysical Animals by Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman: 5. The Four Brilliant Friends & Their Legacy

5. The Four Brilliant Friends & Their Legacy

BBC Radio 4 - Metaphysical Animals by Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, 5. The Four Brilliant Friends & Their Legacy

The lasting philosophical legacy left by the quartet of remarkable women.

The quartet of remarkable friends leave lasting philosophical legacies that continue to shape ethical thinking today. Fenella Woolgar reads.

Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe, the quartet of brilliant thinkers and friends left behind enduring philosophical legacies. Here we find out how their work and theories shape and illuminate today's ethical thinking.  

The life-long friends first met at Oxford University during WWII when many male students and tutors were conscripted. Taught by refugee scholars, conscientious objectors and a number of women tutors the four friends were profoundly affected by the unprecedented horrors of war, especially the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In response they set out to make sense of the disorder and despair that followed, and developed a philosophy relevant to every day life, which went on to shape contemporary ethical thinking.  

We meet the quartet at the start of their friendship, as they embark on their lives as undergraduates, and later as they take up jobs in the post war period. We encounter the philosophers who inspired their thinking from the brilliant but chaotic, Ludwig Wittgenstein to the superstar thinker, Jean-Paul Sartre. Later, we witness their theorising and thought as it evolved over the decades.  All the while, we are with them as they go about the stuff of everyday living, including the sometimes emotional and unconventional turmoil of their love lives. 

Metaphysical Animals is vividly and expertly written by philosophy lecturers, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman who took their inspiration from their own friendship with one of the key players in this remarkable and little known story, Mary Midgley.

Abridged by Katrin Williams
Produced by Elizabeth Allard

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How four brilliant women brought philosophy back to life in Second-World-War Oxford.

Book of the Week. How Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe - four brilliant friends in Second-World-War Oxford - brought philosophy back to life

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Metaphysical Animals by Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

5. The Four Brilliant Friends & Their Legacy

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