Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

by Clare Mac Cumhaill

Philippa told Mary that Herbert Hodges, at Reading, was looking for an assistant. Hodges had studied Classics at Balliol in the early 1920s; his tutor had been Sandie Lindsay. He had spent his philosophical life resisting logical positivism and the vision of philosophy that it promoted.[116] Leaving Oxford for Reading, Hodges created in miniature his vision of a collaborative, synthetic philosophy, in which lecturers and undergraduates from English, Classics and Philosophy gathered together around a cosy fire in a Victorian terrace to talk freely, and without fear of ridicule.[117] He derived this conception of philosophy, as ‘an experiential science of spiritual phenomena’,[118] from the German sociologist and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, on whom, in 1949, Hodges was writing his second book. In his review of Hodges’s first book, Sandie Lindsay remarked on ‘the considerable similarity between Dilthey’s thought and that of the late Prof. Collingwood’. Both ‘recognised that mind and body, man and Nature’ are ‘closely knit.’

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