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paulsnelling's review
5.0
A lovely book combining the philosophical and the personal. Very readable too.
jbradney's review
4.0
An enjoyable book that details how four philosophers challenged the prevailing ethical view and opened the field for future generations.
theciz's review
challenging
informative
medium-paced
3.5
A biography of four female philosophers who were at Oxford together before and during World War II. The book sets up how the four were apparently pivotal to the development of ethics in philosophy - and there lies its biggest failing for me. Despite having read the whole thing, if you asked me what any of them thought and what their impact on the field was, I honestly couldn’t tell you. The discussion of their ideas and their impact is there, but it was so poor I couldn’t follow what it was supposed to mean at all (except one of them was very catholic and therefore anti-abortion). Was it just AJ Ayer says ethics doesn’t exist, but Anscombe, Foot, etc. thought it did? Surely there was more to it, but I couldn’t divine what that was.
So overall you could say it’s too focussed on their life stories, and very unclear (at least to me) on their ideas and legacy/context. Perhaps its the sort of thing you need to be already well versed in early-to-mid-century English academic philosophy discussions to fully grasp the relevance, but I got the impression it was supposed to be more general reader. A shame, as I was looking forward to reading it.
So overall you could say it’s too focussed on their life stories, and very unclear (at least to me) on their ideas and legacy/context. Perhaps its the sort of thing you need to be already well versed in early-to-mid-century English academic philosophy discussions to fully grasp the relevance, but I got the impression it was supposed to be more general reader. A shame, as I was looking forward to reading it.
cmaples's review
Returned to person I borrowed it from, it's a very good book that I'd have enjoyed finishing!
roaming_enn's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
This book chronicles the lives and philosophical views of four female philosophers educated together at Oxford University: Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. It also describes the philosophical background into which they entered university. It honestly does a great job explaining the views of the dominant school of thought at the time, that of A. J. Ayer's and Richard Hare's. (I took a philosophy of language class this past year and learned about both of their views, but I wasn't sure I understood the point of Hare's view until I read this book.) They believed that ethics was nonsense (Ayer) or subjective (Hare), but each of these female philosophers resisted this dominant view in their own way, whether by critiquing it or by proposing a new view. I had heard about all of them before (I mean, who hasn't, right?), but I haven't really read anything from them. Now I'm gonna have to.