Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

by Clare Mac Cumhaill

When the Idealist philosopher R. G. Collingwood had died in 1943, Gilbert Ryle was appointed Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics in his place. For many, this event, which followed quickly after the death of H.W.B. Joseph, marked the final victory of Oxford’s ‘revolution in philosophy’, the triumph of analytic empiricism and linguistic method over the metaphysical excesses of pre-war Idealism and Realism. An unspoken consensus began to develop, sustained in the journal Mind (now edited by Ryle himself) about ‘who was and who was not a “negligible back-number” ’.[13] Discussion papers on Urmson, Woozley, Austin, Ayer, Ryle, Ewing, Carnap and Strawson filled its pages; but no one ‘would have felt it worthwhile even to disagree with, say, Joseph or Collingwood.’[14] Some time around the late 1940s, J. L. Austin would feign faint recollection of the previous Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics – ‘Some kind of historian wasn’t he?’