In April 1945, a newsreel film entitled German Atrocities appeared in British cinemas. Having been spared graphic images during most of the war, this was, for most British civilians, their first encounter with the horrors of the concentration camps. After watching footage of emaciated bodies and piled-up corpses, the 24-year-old Philippa Foot told her mentor, the philosopher Donald MacKinnon: “Nothing is ever going to be the same again.” These were acts, Foot felt, that were undeniably evil, and if philosophy was unable to identify them as such, then there was a major problem with philosophy.
And there was indeed a problem. The moral philosophy taught at Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s pictured the world as value free. According to the influential AJ Ayer, all ethical statements, since they can never be empirically tested, are meaningless.
Foot had studied at Oxford with three other remarkable women: Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley, each of whom was to devote themselves to arguing with the Oxford tradition, be it through novels, academic papers, books or radio broadcasts.
Benjamin Lipscomb’s new group biography, The Women Are Up to Something, is a fascinating exploration of their life and thought. They each tackled moral philosophy in ways as distinct as their backgrounds and beliefs. Bringing together Murdoch, “a bohemian novelist and spiritual seeker,” Anscombe, “a zealous Catholic convert and mother of seven,” Foot, “an atheistic daughter of privilege,” and Midgley, “a stay-at-home mother who finally wrote the first of her 16 books in her 50s” (59 to be precise), Lipscomb paints a vivid portrait not only of them as people, but also a moment in British philosophy too often told through the male line.