Into the Wardrobe

Ever heard of Mary Midgley? She was born in 1919 the daughter of an Anglican curate and began studying in Oxford in 1938. She married in 1950, raised a family, and for many years taught moral philosophy at the University of Newcastle. Her first book was published in 1978 when she was 59. Her autobiography The Owl of Minerva appeared in 2005. Her writing is a marvel of readability.

Years ago I wrote to ask her for possible reminiscences of C. S. Lewis. The result was far from disappointing. The letters are now posted on my website at .

Yes, that piece is now online:
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue64/64midgley.htm.
I found this through the "Selected Articles" list following the Wikipedia item on MM.

I've finished 'The Ethical Primate' She raises some very good points especially the one about abstraction being necessarily relative or partial truth. Her point about the various enlightenment views of ethics involving a dualism placing one aspect of human nature considered as an abstraction over and against our supposedly causally determined animal nature is also very much to the point. However I'm left wondering if she is still not reductive in her own view of ethics in that she reduces it to the affective. That is she regards ethics as a quest for psychological harmony, as a way of finding inner peace in the midst of conflicting desires. This raises the question why ought we to seek this kind of peace. Can we get beyond the purely descriptive and in some measure determined desire to do so? Is the ethical choice sometimes the most upsetting?

I would also like to see how she would fit her ideas in with forms of therapy more recent than Freud. A comparison with Carl Rogers would be very interesting.