Episode 50, 'The Golden Age of Female Philosophy' with Rachael Wiseman (Part II)

The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast

Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture, Courses

4.8 • 612 Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rachael Wiseman is a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Liverpool and previously an Addison Wheeler Research Fellow at Durham University. She, and her colleague Dr Clare MacCumhaill, are co-leaders on the British Academy funded project, In Parenthesis, which explores the work and friendship of the philosophical wartime quartet: Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. Dr Wiseman, along with her colleague Professor Amber Carpenter, are also co-leaders of the Integrity Project, which looks at the meaning, relevance, and importance of 'integrity' across many spheres: moral, political, and even integrity in public philosophy. Dr Wiseman publishes research at the intersection of philosophy of mind, action and ethics, and has written on Elizabeth Anscombe's approach to the hard problem of consciousness, the nature of the self and action, and a monograph on Elizabeth Anscombe's own monograph, Intention.

In this episode, we will be talking to Dr Wiseman about her In Parenthesis project and the four female philosophers that she argues constitute a school of philosophy, one which is regularly omitted from the orthodox canon of 'great thinkers' or 'schools of thought'. In the words of Rachael and here colleague Clare MacCumhaill:

The history of Analytic Philosophy we are familiar with is a story about men… [and] The male dominance is not just in the names of the 'star' players. Michael Beaney's 2013 Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy begins by listing the 150 most important analytic philosophers. 146 of them are men. For women who wish to join in this conversation, the odds seem formidably against one.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Part two, further analyses and discussion.
0:16.2	So at the end of our last section in part one,
0:18.6	we're talking about what constitutes them as a group,
0:21.4	or perhaps they were all saying no to this AJ, R.M. Hair. And there's things we can test
0:27.9	through science, and the rest is either you just try to prescribe your view or you just saying,
0:32.6	boo, I don't like this, just asserting your emotions. And the historical context of them as well. I just want to give
0:38.6	a quote from Philip a foot here, and which you essentially were putting in your own words at the end of
0:44.0	that section, Rachel. It was significant that the news of the concentration camps hit us just as
0:49.5	I came back to Oxford in 1945. This news was shattering in a fashion that no one now can easily
0:56.1	understand. We have thought that something like this could not happen. This is what got me interested
1:01.2	in moral philosophy in particular. In the face of such news of the concentration camps,
1:05.4	I thought it just can't be the way Stevenson Air and Hare Sayersaders and the subject haunted me. So all of them,
1:13.0	were they all saying no to this thing? And that's what makes them a group or a school of, can be
1:19.4	considered a school of thought. Yeah. I mean, it's not just the fact that they said no, because of course
1:24.6	other people have said no, but was the the project that they then
1:28.8	started to undertake in those conversations in philippa foot's living room their idea about
1:35.7	what what it would look like to dismantle that position but yeah i think the joint no is a really
1:41.5	good way of grasping the sense in which they're kind of unified.
1:47.2	So you and Claire want to argue that these four make this kind of school called the wartime Quartet.
1:55.4	Now, I guess we can ask kind of simply then what is a school and why do these four women make this
2:02.1	school of thought?
2:03.3	So here's a thought here that I'm having.
	...

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