Reading list
Here you will find the readings assigned for each session. We might tweak them as we go along - we hope not, or not much, but it might be a good idea to check before getting down to them.
Week one: w/c 15th October 2018
Mary Midgley, ‘Then and Now’ (available at http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/then-and-now/)
Mary Warnock, Women Philosophers, entries on Murdoch, Midgley, Anscombe, and Foot. The Everyman Library, 1996.
Week two: w/c 22nd October 2018
Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, chs. 1-4. Routledge, 1985.
Week three: w/c 29th October 2018
Iris Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection’, pp. 1 – 23, in The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1970.
Nora Hämälänen, ‘Reduce Ourselves to Zero?: Sabina Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, and Feminism’. Hypatia 30.4 (2015), pp. 743-759.
Week four: w/c 5th November 2018
Mary Midgley, What is Philosophy For?, chs. 1-4. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Week five: w/c 12th November 2018
Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, chs. 6-7.Oxford University Press, 2001.
‘The Grammar of Goodness: An Interview with Philippa Foot’,The Harvard Review of Philosophy, XI 2003, http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/hrp/issues/2003/Foot.pdf
Nakul Krishna, ‘Is Goodness Natural?’ https://aeon.co/essays/how-philippa-foot-set-her-mind-against-prevailing-moral-philosophy
Week six: w/c 19th November 2018
Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, ch.5.Oxford University Press, 2001.
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, ch. 17, ‘Axioms, Duties, Eros’. Penguin Books, 1992
Week seven: w/c 26th November 2018
Mary Midgley, ‘The Concept of Beastliness’, Philosophy 48 (184):111-135 (1973)
Week eight: w/c 3rd December 2018
Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘On Promising and its Justice, and Whether it Need be Respected in Foro Interno’, in Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, 1st edn edition (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 1981).
Week nine: w/c 10th December 2018
Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self, chs. 3-4. Routledge, 2010.
Week 10: w/c 14th January 2019
Iris Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection’, pp. 34 (from ‘I have used the word “attention”…’) - 45, in The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1970.
Simone Weil, ‘Love’, and ‘Attention and Will’, in Gravity and Grace, Routledge, 1963.
Justin Broackes, ‘Iris Murdoch’s first encounters with Simone Weil’, Iris Murdoch Review, pp. 17-20, 2017. https://d3mcbia3evjswv.cloudfront.net/files/IMR8%20final%20interior.pdf?f64VNLiqBJzY6omMCtWD7uAallFDa00h
Week 11: w/c 21st January 2019
Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘On Brute Facts’, in Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, 1st edn edition (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 1981).
Week 12: w/c 28th January 2019
Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, in Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, 1st edn edition (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 1981).
Week 13: w/c 4th February 2019
Iris Murdoch,‘Metaphysics and Ethics’, in Existentialists and Mystics, Penguin Books, 1997.
Week 14: w/c 11th February 2019
Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘The First Person’, in Mind and Language: Wolfson College Lectures 1974, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 45–64; reprinted in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume 2), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, 21–36.
Week 15: w/c 25th February 2019
Mary Midgley, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers, ch.1 ‘Philosophical Plumbing’, Routledge 1996
Week 16: w/c 4th March 2019
Iris Murdoch, 'Vision and Choice in Morality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. vol. 30 (1956): 32–58
Week 17: w/c 11th March 2019
Rachael Wiseman and Clare Mac Cumhaill’s ‘Rewriting History: Murdoch, Midgley, Foot and Anscombe as a Philosophical School’, talk at University of Pennsylvania, September 2018. Available here.
Benjamin Lipscomb, 2015. ‘Slipping out over the wall’: Midgley, Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch’ in Science and the Self: Animals, Evolution, and Ethics: Essays in Honour of Mary Midgley, ed. Ian James Kidd, and Elizabeth McKinnell, Routledge.