Philosophy and the Discourse
Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb’s new joint biography of four female philosophers is an engaging read, but more so, it offers guidance on how to engage with those with whom we disagree.
Review by Peter Blair
If you’re not willing to be arrested for doing philosophy, perhaps you are not really doing philosophy at all. This is one conclusion a reader could take away from The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics, a new book by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb, a professor of philosophy at Houghton College. At least two of the figures Lipscomb sketches in his book, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe, were arrested, the former for protesting at American military base, the latter (twice) for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic. (Anscombe was also arrested earlier in life by “the Oxford police… ‘for wandering about with her hair down’”; this and other Anscombian eccentricities are given a proportionate amount of space in The Women Are Up to Something).
The title of the book, in fact, comes from an episode of protest, though not one that ended in jail: when Anscombe led a (poorly organized) charge against Oxford’s decision to grant President Truman an honorary doctorate—she believed his decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan to be a war crime—“the University administration… solicited a crowd to show up and vote in support of Truman’s degree. ‘The women are up to something,’ some were told. ‘We have to go and vote them down.’”
Though it is a quick read, Lipscomb’s book can be read on a number of levels. In part, it’s a multiperson biography. He gives the reader biographical sketches of all four of his main subjects, from childhood through their working years to death. Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch were all 20th century philosophers who studied at Oxford around the same time, and went on to make important contributions inside and outside the academy, especially in the domain of moral philosophy. They all knew each other and were friends, though with varying degrees of intimacy depending on which two you select out. If you are familiar with these figures only through their published work or intellectual reputation, as I was, the biographical sketches are engaging, though they are by no means exhaustive.
The Women are Up to Something is also an abbreviated philosophical sketch, an attempt to articulate the intellectual content of the main contribution these four friends made, as well as to distinguish their approach from the rival metaphysical and moral pictures they opposed. Their approach is often called “virtue ethics,” a moral theory that situates moral capacities in the context of what human beings objectively need to live a good or flourishing life. They offered this approach as an alternative to a view that says there are no objective moral facts in the world, that humans simply decide on their own code of ethics and then strive to live consistently by it. Lipscomb does a good job of explaining the content of these debates for someone who isn’t previously familiar with them. Those who come into the book with some background in moral philosophy, however, are likely to find these discussions pretty basic—though, even then, the way he situates these issues in the day-to-day life of Oxford and the personal relationships between key figures may be fresh.
Moral questions, for her, were not just a subject of academic debate; if you find the truth, it has to be lived.
These are the two levels of the book that Lipscomb himself explicitly identifies in the book’s preface. But The Women are Up to Something can also be read sociologically, as a case study in how dominant intellectual paradigms can be challenged, and as an account of the structural, material, and personal factors that allow for new approaches to get a hearing. Those interested in how disfavored intellectual positions can come to be respected in the academy should find this book interesting on that score. Finally, there is at least one other level to the book that arises from its biographical sketches, a way in which the book does first-order virtue ethics of its own by offering a vision of the kind of virtues that are needed for people of radically different overall philosophical and theological commitments to cooperate together in pursuit of a shared good. After all, virtue ethics is often done by example, by portraits.
Though Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch all agreed with each other on some questions of moral philosophy, and though they shared to some limited degree a common project, their broader background commitments and projects were very different. Anscombe was a committed “traditional” Catholic; Foot was a “card carrying atheist”; Murdoch was, at one time, a Communist and became a secularized Neoplatonic mystic; Midgley was very interested in the hard sciences. Yet despite these differences, which occasionally led to contentions between them, they worked together as friends to challenge dominant trends in Oxford philosophy.
What makes this possible? The example of Anscombe is especially instructive. Though, as Lipscomb stresses, Anscombe inspired hatred in some just as much as she inspired love in others, he also paints a picture of the virtues she possessed that, it seems, made possible her cooperation with her friends. Anscombe hated unseriousness and mere cleverness in philosophical debate. For her, philosophy was a serious, existential endeavor, and anyone approaching the subject in a glib way drew her ire—even people who were “on her side.”
Lipscomb spends some time on the famous incident in which Anscombe publicly debated C.S. Lewis on the question of the grounds of our confidence in the reliability of our cognitive faculties. Though Lewis was, of course, a fellow Christian, Anscombe had little patience for what she took to be his poor engagement with the questions they were debating. On the other hand, Anscombe later praised Lewis for the way he revised his arguments after her criticism, and accused herself of glibness:
Recalling the debate in 1981, in the introduction to a volume of her collected papers, Anscombe wrote: “rereading… my criticisms [of Lewis]… it seems to me that they are just. At the same time, I find them lacking in any recognition of the depth of the problem.” She went on to contrast her own remarks unfavorably with the revised argument in the 1960 edition of [Lewis’s book] Miracles, which corresponded “more to the actual depth and difficulty of the questions being discussed.” She concluded, “I think we haven’t an answer yet to [Lewis’s] question….”
Those who only know the first half of the Lewis story might be surprised by the way she ultimately saw his revised approach as superior to hers. Here we see a number of healthy intellectual tendencies at work: a rejection of tribalism, a serious approach to hard questions, the ability to detect intellectual faults in oneself, and a willingness to give credit where it is due, even to people who are philosophically less talented than oneself. The seriousness with which Anscombe took philosophy, of course, ties into the protests she made throughout her life, including her arrests at abortion clinics. Moral questions, for her, were not just a subject of academic debate; if you find the truth, it has to be lived.
In showing us some of the virtues that make possible cooperation across difference, Lipscomb’s book does a valuable service.
Lipscomb provides other examples. Foot, an atheist, was the person most responsible for making virtue ethics mainstream at Oxford, because she was the person most equipped by background and temperament to “fit in” in the Oxford philosophical world. She started out with the standard views about moral philosophy that were popular at the time, and an important milestone in her journey towards full-blown virtue ethics was reading Wittgenstein. Anscombe, who studied with Wittgenstein, had long been an advocate of his, but she never tried to force Foot to read him. When Foot did eventually read him, she took her friend to task for not having urged her on earlier. “It is very important to have one’s resistances,” rejoined Anscombe. Anscombe, that is, thought defeasible resistance to intellectual trends, which can always devolve into fads, was a good habit to have, even in cases when she agreed with those trends. (Those looking for another virtuous example of defeasible resistances could not do better than studying the life of St. John Henry Newman).
Another important milestone for Foot was her reading of Aquinas. In light of the Wittgenstein episode, Anscombe was more forward in putting Foot onto Aquinas at an important moment in Foot’s intellectual journey. But this was not typical for Anscombe. As Lipscomb notes:
Anscombe had studied Aquinas closely since her teenage years and looked to him for instruction on any and every topic. Her doctoral thesis was originally meant to be on Aquinas. She concluded over time, though, that referencing Aquinas made people “silly.” Some Catholics were uncritically deferential to Aquinas as a Doctor of the Church. Citing Aquinas made these people stop thinking—an offense against philosophy. Some non-Catholics on the other hand, like Bertrand Russell in his A History of Western Philosophy, were ignorantly dismissive of Aquinas, so allergic to theology in general or Catholicism in particular that they were incapable of consciously learning from a medieval Catholic theologian. Anscombe generally chose, then, to absorb and rearticulate Aquinas’s insights without mentioning him by name.
Citing Aquinas in place of thinking and being “incapable of consciously learning from a medieval Catholic theologian” are both dangers one sees illustrated on certain social media sites every day. Here again Anscombe shows another path of respectful but intelligent engagement.
In showing us some of the virtues that make possible cooperation across difference, Lipscomb’s book does a valuable service. If we can learn from it, the quality of public debate and discussion—on social media, in publications, and in the academy—could be greatly improved.
Peter Blair is the Program Director for the Augustine Collective at the Veritas Forum. Before joining Veritas, he worked at the American Interest and the Thomistic Institute. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Fare Forward, and currently is Editor-at-Large for FF. He tweets at @PeterAWBlair and runs The Pelican, a pro-life newsletter.
The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics was published by Oxford University Press on November 1, 2021. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
