This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy Bites is available at www.filosophybytes.com.

Mary Midgley only died a few years ago but was born just a year after the end of World War I.

As Ellie Robson explains, all her life she was fascinated by the relationships

between humans and other animals and the way we describe them.

Ellie Robson, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you for having me.

The topic we're going to talk about is Mary Midgley on animals. Who was Mary Midgley?

So Mary Midgely was a 20th century British philosopher.

She was born in 1919 in Ealing near London and she lived an astonishing 99 years, 40 of which she was publishing books about philosophy.

She started very late in philosophy, didn't she?

So Midley doesn't begin publishing

until she's 59 years old. And she famously says in her amazing biography, The Owl of Minerva,

that she just didn't know what she thought before then, which is quite a privilege for us

in academia nowadays. Imagine waiting until you were 59 before publishing your first book.

But she wasn't an autodidact. I mean, she came out of Oxford academic philosophy.

Yeah, so this is a great story, which is the topic of two new, popular books about four

amazing women philosophers who were all writing throughout their lives, really, but they met

as undergraduates at Oxford University in 1938.

And Midgely was there alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foote and Iris Murdoch.

And they all continued having a philosophical friendship all the way through their lives.

Iris Murdoch was Mary Michaly's bridesmaid.

So they were all doing philosophy and they all went on to become these formidable women

...