杏吧原创

MARY MIDGLEY once famously crossed swords with Richard Dawkins in a heated but ultimately unproductive row over the metaphor of the selfish gene. This incident is strangely absent in The Owl of Minerva, a warm and humorous memoir by one of the UK鈥檚 leading moral philosophers and critic of reductionism in science. The book reveals a now-lost world that served as the background to the intellectual passions, not just of Midgley, who is 86, but of a generation of British women philosophers.

Midgley is the daughter of a Church of England clergyman and the granddaughter of a judge. She grew up in the kind of genteel English poverty of freezing houses, but huge gardens; noisy little cars, but servants; home-made clothes, but fee-paying schools. It is just the kind of background that produced women who became MPs, suffragettes, stalwarts of charitable causes and academic philosophers.

鈥淭he absence of men freed them to find their voice鈥�

Midgley, who abandoned Christianity early, gained a place at Somerville College at the University of Oxford in 1938. She was one of a number of women who would make their names as philosophers, including Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe 鈥� one of Wittgenstein鈥檚 disciples 鈥� and the moral philosophers Philippa Foot and Mary Warnock. All studied 鈥済reats鈥�, the Oxford honours course that includes ancient Greek, Latin, ancient history and philosophy.

An education predominantly in the classics is a peculiar preparation for life as a philosopher. Bertrand Russell (originally a mathematician) talks of the evil of specialisation, which in the case of classics ensures that nobody may write about Plato unless they have spent their youth on the study of ancient languages, to the exclusion of everything Plato himself would have found important. Beyond that is what I call the evil of schoolmasterly pedantry, appropriate to drumming grammatical exactitude into schoolchildren but unlikely to foster an imaginative, exploratory, experimental cast of mind. Midgley herself escaped, largely through a later self-education in ethology, animal behaviour and other life sciences.

She attributes her rise, and that of her contemporaries, to the absence of men during the second world war. She means not just that women got the degrees when the men were away, but that the absence of men gave them the freedom to find their voices. Philosophy is too often an argumentative discipline, and at the student level, and perhaps beyond, men too often patronise or upstage women. It is impossible to tell how many careers have been blighted as a result. Midgley and her contemporaries were indeed fortunate to grow without being sprinkled with such acid rain, though it may be hard for those who have known them in later life to imagine them being upstaged by anything short of the last trump.

For me, the saddest part of this book relates to the demise of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne鈥檚 philosophy department in the 1980s, where Midgley worked after Oxford. It is an all-too-typical story of the vandalism that began to assail British higher education under Margaret Thatcher and that has continued ever since.

I remember visiting Midgley in Newcastle and recall a dedicated, hard-working, imaginative department, providing an excellent education in logic, the theory of knowledge, history and ethics. This, however, was not what government wanted then or now. Instead, universities were and are treated as cost-efficient 鈥渦nits鈥� delivering value for money. It was goodbye to subjects such as philosophy, physics, chemistry, modern, oriental and Middle-Eastern languages, and hello to business-friendly courses in leisure, media or management.

The 鈥渙wl of Minerva鈥� in Midgley鈥檚 memoir is Hegel鈥檚 symbol of wisdom. It takes wing only with the coming of the dark. Many young students sense well enough that in the present darkness, articulate and informed understanding of our scientific civilisation, its values and politics is necessary. They need their Midgleys.