A review by roaming_enn
The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics by Benjamin J B Lipscomb

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.