Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

by Clare Mac Cumhaill

Thus, for the older Mary reflecting on the past, the way to tell the story of herself and her friends was to begin with them knitting together the great cleavage in reality that Ayer celebrated and Hare accepted – bringing fact and value back together. From this, she said, ‘a lot of metaphysics would follow’. On to the knitting needles would go Philippa’s notes on Aquinas (one of ‘the best sources that we have for moral philosophy’); fragments of Wittgenstein’s latest writings turned out of Elizabeth’s pockets (forms of human life); Mary’s inky notes on Plotinus (reality not existence); Iris’s heavily annotated copies of Gabriel Marcel’s Être et avoir (problems and mysteries). Memories of wartime lessons: Ross and Prichard’s moral intuition; Collingwood’s clothes-line and Lindsay’s entia rationis; Price’s un-observed cats; Cassirer’s lessons on Kant’s Achtung; Joseph’s ‘bits of living’ and Miss Glover’s talk of love’s capacity to reveal the Good; Plato, Aristotle and Donald MacKinnon’s analogical concepts and this insight: we are metaphysical animals.