Bringing philosophy back to life

Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman. Vintage. 2023.

A group biography of four women who were all Oxford undergraduates and emerged as professional philosophers after the Second World War, Metaphysical Animals is an ambitious project, interweaving four disjointed lives with social and political trends, as well as telling the story of how its protagonists set themselves against the current male-dominated philosophical orthodoxy.

The logical positivist A.J.Ayer provided a clear target. His influential Language, Truth and Logic (1936) cut through what he saw as metaphysical mumbo-jumbo with the demand that philosophy should confine itself to linguistic propositions that could be proved or disproved. Logical formulae began to make philosophy papers look more like maths.

But where did that leave morality and ethics? Out in the cold and, as Cumbhaill and Wiseman repeatedly tell us, subject to the withering put-down by smart, young and almost always male philosophers, “I don’t understand that”, which, they comment, was “no longer the beginning of a philosophical conversation, but the end of one”.

The resistance was led by Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch, the subjects of this book. Their work began, as the book’s clever double-meaning subtitle puts it, to “bring philosophy back to life” in response to what Midgley described as the “pure weedkiller” of the logical positivists’ approach.

Whilst “good” and “bad” might, as Ayer insisted, mean no more than “hooray” or “boo”, they argued that more specific words with moral overtones, like “shame”, “pride”, “brave” or “respect”, are complicated ideas created as “symbolic objects” in our culture. A child, as it learns, “must ‘catch on’ to the meaning of these descriptions and come to see his own actions and the actions of those around him under them”.

Through varied representations of culture, including poems, stories, maps and words, the agreed meaning of such words is shared. It depends on context, which in turn is part of the whole canvas of society and history. As “metaphysical animals”, we “dwell in the past as well as the present” and a philosophy which properly reflects life as experienced cannot be isolated from those unquantifiable complexities – however unsatisfactory that might seem to the logical positivists.

The book links the social history of the women philosophers’ influence to the changing population of Oxford during the war. Men disappeared as they were called up, Jewish academic refugees appeared as they managed to escape the Nazis and at the end of the war, the university population swelled again with those who had missed out during the war years.

The authors struggle to knit the turbulent lives of the four women with their many partners, spouses, dependents and changing professional lives into a coherent narrative and the reader needs to keep on top of a large and changing cast of peripheral characters (but there is always the index to help).

Cumbhaill and Wiseman do a skilful job in connecting the evolving thinking of each of the four philosophers with that of the other three, highlighting meetings, conversations and shared crises as points when the philosophical ideas can be explained in just enough detail to provide a sense what was at stake.

The women seem to have had a wider influence than today’s philosophers, often being invited to give BBC radio talks with titles like “The Natural History of Contradictions” and “The Novelist as Metaphysician” and churning out articles and reviews for general publications. Their message and tone, after all, was far more digestible than that of the logical positivists.

I’m left wondering what impact on Oxford philosophy, or philosophy in general, the women had. In their battle to bring “philosophy back to life”, were they successful? I suspect not, because if they had been, the authors would surely have ended on that note of triumph. Did they have a partial success or create a side-stream that is still flowing today? The reader of Metaphysical Animals will be rooting for them, so I hope there is still something to cheer about.

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Inside Hollywood: the Screenwriter's Tale

Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting by William Goldman


Do they teach this book in film school? It's so readable, so gossipy and interesting you might think not because it's too much fun.

But it's also so practical, so illuminating about the craft and, especially, about the complex web of human relationships involved in film-making, you might think film schools would be crazy not to insist that every student read, learn and inwardly digest it.

William Goldman's account of his working life can't help but include stories about colleagues like Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood and others. He talks about disastrous films. And great films that were counted as disasters. And about the many kinds of hell he was put through as a writer on projects that lasted months or years and then never happened.

So the book is part tutorial - what a scriptwriter actually does - and part autobiography. And the joy of the latter is that he gives himself no airs, despite having written, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and All the President's Men (1976), A Bridge too Far (1977), Marathon Man (1976), Misery (1990) and many others.

At the end of the book, there's a very specific treat: the chance to see how he adapts a short short (his own) into a script, and then has other professionals (a designer, cinematographer, editor and composer) critique it, as if they were preparing to be part of its production. The reader gets a chance to see exactly what kind of detailed issues would arise.

The highlight of that section is the comments of the director George Roy Hill (he of Butch Cassidy, Slaugherhouse Five, The Sting and The World According to Garp), who is unrestrained in his rudeness about Goldman's script:

“What you've done here is take a story that works pretty well on paper, but you really make some fundamental errors in your screenplay -and since you are very glib and very clever and very able, you have covered up those errors and masked them so that most people would not see them. But I would I think be inclined to unmask you.”

What follows is a scathing analysis, which you'd think would make any writer either give up on the whole idea of the film, or abandon the idea of working with Hill. But Goldman takes it on the chin, and lets us witness his humiliation - in his own book.

"Pretty withering," Goldman comments when Hill has finished, "but pretty helpful too". He's a brave man. He says he disagrees with what Hill says but adds - three times - "he may be right".

What comes out of the book is that screenwriting may be lonely work - just you and pages to fill. But it is equally a role that required deft handling of people. And not just ordinarily awkward people, but Hollywood people, people with huge egos, huge wealth and ambition who didn't get where they are by trying to make everyone happy. And they are people under pressure: to get decisions, to avoid wasting millions or blowing their own professional reputations, and all that against deadlines.

In the end, Goldman's message is that for all his experience and professionalism, in Hollywood "nobody knows anything". The public can just as easily ignore a film that Hollywood insiders think is brilliant and love one that Hollywood has written off as a dud. If it was easy, I suppose they wouldn't get paid what they do.


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Cockney or Aristocrat? The Case that Captivated Victorian Britain

The Fraud by Zadie Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Zadie Smith became fascinated by a couple of enormous legal cases in Victorian London which tested the claims of a man from Australia who said he was the rightful heir to an aristocratic estate in Hampshire.

‘The Tichborne Claimant’, as he was known, was at the centre of much more than an epic legal battle (which he lost). He became a rallying point for radical political movements, and - strangely - a symbol of the dominance of a Catholic elite in British society.

Smith has cleverly interlocked this history with that of the once-successful novelist W.H.Ainsworth, whose popularity was overtaken by Dickens, and with the enslavement at a younger age, of the Claimant’s supporter and a former faithful family servant, Andrew Bogle. She takes a few admitted liberties with timelines, but the key points of her story match the history.

It’s quite a long novel, but not as long as the book looks because it is made up of many chapters which are mostly no more than about two pages long, which means there is an almost blank page every page or so.

I came to the novel having read a long book on the subject - The Tichborne Claimant by Douglas Woodruff (1957) - which goes into more detail than Smith, who has a broader panorama to fill. So I already knew many of the characters and legal complications. I wonder if readers coming to it fresh would be able to figure out what was going on.

Woodruff is, if anything, somewhat sympathetic to the Claimant - at least, he does not take it for granted that the court decisions dismissing his claim were correct. Smith calls her book The Fraud, so there's not much doubt about where she stands on that question. Which makes it a bit less interesting.

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