Owl of Minerva: A Memoir [Hardcover]

I believe that when the philosophical dust from the 20th century finally settles, Mary Midgley will be regarded as among the more important philosophical writers (not just professors of philosophy) of the latter portion of the century. She wrote polemically but perspicaciously about animal rights, as in her work BEAST AND MAN, on many scientific questions (as in her work THE MYTHS WE LIVE BY), and on numerous other subjects.

Her autobiography contains fascinating portraits of her family, such as her husband, Geoffrey, who was an inspiring teacher, and her famous friends, such as Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe, but many readers will perhaps find most interesting her comments on the philosophical luminaries she encountered, such as Wittgeinstein, whose inimitable philosophical manner she describes thus:

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The extraordinary thing about Wittgenstein is that he succeeded in making crucial things clear in philosophy in spite of his fearful communication difficulties. These difficulties seem to have been more or less of the kind that is now discussed under the heading of Aspberger's Syndrome, and though such classifications can be slick and misleading, I think the central point does seem right. There was surely a kind of emotional remoteness that shut him off in many ways from those around him. But perhaps it was the terror induced by that very sense of remoteness that made him able to stress our social nature so powerfully. Having been very close to real solipsism he rebounded from it with tremendous violence. Thus he was able to break away from the conviction of individual isolation produced by [Descartes's] _Cogito_ and to replant us in our proper soil as social beings.
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She also emphasizes that Wittgenstein's ideas about the world-beyond-language have eluded many of his interpreters:

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. . . far from believing that everything outside science is nonsense, Wittgenstein himself thought (even then) that what could not be said was far more importannt than the relatively trifling things that were sayable. What lay beyond speech was, he said, the _mystical_, by which he did _not_ mean nonsense but the profound, the true stuff of our lives. . . of course the TRACTATUS is so obscurely written that there was nothing very surprising in its being misinterpreted. In fact, Wittgenstein might be said to have proved his own depressing proposition. The TRACTATUS, after all, was only words, and words alone, not fully back up by explanation in a suitable form of life, do indeed often prove inadequate for human communication.
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Her descriptions of her philosophical life at the University of Reading make us consider the virtues of an earlier age, in which British philosophical discussion was not only the province of specialists in the Oxbridge constellation:

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What did strike me was that it was possible to talk freely. Dons openly admitted that they were interested in subjects other than their own, and were willing to talk about them without looking round to see if the expert was going to confute them. If someone said, `That's really a biological question,' this did not lead to an anguish-ridden silence, but to finding a biologist at once and asking him about it. Nobody seemed frightened of having their reputation destroyed; nobody considered that a chance question over a coffee cup demanded an _ex cathedra_ pronouncement. The state of being unable to say or write anything for fear that one might get it slightly wrong was not common, and where it existed it was not held in honour. I cannot express how much I liked this. When I had anything to write, I began to be able to write it, and so to work my way past mistakes. For Oxford, though it has never managed to stop my mouth, had come very near to freezing up my pen.
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In her book, Midgley details the puffed pretensions of some British philosophy dons, even as she relies on the idea of philosophical fear, which was first expressed by Iris Murdoch, to explain the character of some philosophers: "What is this philosopher afraid of?" Murdoch asked as she examined the works of 20th century philosophers. As Midgley writes:

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It is indeed important to ask what any particular philosopher is afraid of. . . . what really frightened analytic philosophers was the danger of being though _weak_ -- vague, credulous, sentimental, superstitious or simply too wide in their sympathies. Unlike their forebears in William James's time, they were much more afraid of looking weak than they were of missing something unexpected and important. They were not at all afraid (on the other hand) of being thought too narrow. So they were happy to exclude all topics that could expose them to that central danger.
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Her general comments on the narrowness of academe seem particularly apt at present:

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In fact, the whole habit of dividing academic study into fixed disciplines is much more a matter of adminstrative convenience than of intellectual necessity. The ways in which subjects are divided often change and original thinkers constantly move between them. The demand for strict monoculture does not come from scholars (though any set of academics who are told that they constitute a centre of excellence will probably not reject the idea). The real demand for segregation comes from the administrators and, above all, from the accountants.
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She also questions whether we are justified in espousing techno-optimism about the future:

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Fantasies about the future therefore grow like mushrooms in our imaginations. At present, for many people these tend to take two forms. There are hopes concerned with technical miracles such as articial intelligence, space travel and genetic engineering. There are also economic hopes based on a faith in market forces.

Both these kinds of proposal deal in means, not ends. They make no suggestion about what we should be trying to do, only about how cleverly we are going to do it. They aim to increase our power, not to make us use it differently. However, destruction being easier than construction, an increase in power can always do more harm than good unless real efforts are made to prevent its doing so. . . . We need somehow to get it into our heads that most of our troubles do not come from lack of power but from our own abuse of it.
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Her excellent autobiography reveals that a productive philosophical life need not be expressed only in the writing of books and articles, and in discussions with professors of philosophy: Mary Midgley speaks to the philosophical impulse in each of us, and we may all benefit from listening to her.

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