British moral philosopher, sustained critic of scientific reductionism, and one of the four women — with Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch — whose Oxford undergraduate years during the Second World War, in the relative absence of male students, produced the postwar reconstruction of British moral philosophy along lines other than the dominant analytic ones. She did not publish her first book, Beast and Man, until she was fifty-nine, and she remained intellectually active until her death at ninety-nine; the late starts and the long arc are themselves part of the work, which moves with a deliberate, civil, devastating tempo unlike anything else in twentieth-century philosophy.
Midgley was born Mary Scrutton in London in 1919, the daughter of a Cambridge chaplain. She read Mods and Greats at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1938, and through the early 1940s was part of the small circle of women — Anscombe, Foot, Murdoch, Mary Warnock — who together challenged the reigning emotivism and logical positivism of the Oxford men's curriculum, partly out of the conviction that a moral philosophy that could not say what was wrong with Hitler was not worth having. She married the philosopher Geoffrey Midgley in 1950, raised three sons, and taught at Newcastle University from 1962 to 1980.
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978) was the first book — written, she later said, only after she had something to say. It argued, against the then-dominant tendency to treat human beings as either pure social construction or pure biology, that we are continuous with the rest of animal life and that this continuity is the proper starting point for moral reflection. Animals and Why They Matter (1983) extended the argument into one of the early systematic statements of moral concern for non-human animals.
Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (1984) is the central book. Against the contemporary tendency to treat human evil as either pathology (medicalized) or absence (privation, lack of imagination), Midgley argued that wickedness is a real human capacity rooted in the misuse of capacities that are themselves needed and good. The book is short, fierce, and continues to be read. Science as Salvation (1992) and The Myths We Live By (2003) extended her sustained critique of scientism — the conviction, she argued, that science could replace rather than complement other ways of understanding human life — and in particular her critique of the "selfish gene" rhetoric of Richard Dawkins, which she had attacked in a famous 1979 Philosophy article ("Gene-Juggling") that drew an angry response and began an exchange that continued for decades. She insisted, with considerable evolutionary literacy, that the metaphors science chooses for itself are not optional decoration but constitutive of how its arguments work.
Midgley wrote her late memoir The Owl of Minerva in 2005, gave interviews into her late nineties, and saw her last book, What Is Philosophy For?, published in October 2018, the month she died. The recent biographies of the Oxford quartet — Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman's Metaphysical Animals (2022) and Benjamin Lipscomb's The Women Are Up to Something (2021) — have placed her, alongside Murdoch, Anscombe, and Foot, in the position she long deserved as one of the central figures of postwar British moral philosophy.
Midgley is on the graph because she is the major late-twentieth-century philosopher of the continuity between human and non-human life, the most patient critic of scientism in serious philosophical English, and (with Murdoch, Williams, Foot, and Anscombe) one of the figures who kept moral philosophy from being absorbed into the analytic specialisms of the postwar academy. Her late work is also a model of what intellectually serious public philosophy can look like outside the academy.