Mary Midgley

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2005

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the philosopher Mary Midgley. For the last 30 years Mary Midgley has been one of Britain's leading moral philosophers. She has been called "the most frightening philosopher in the country" as a result of her ideas and the acuity with which she defends them. Her work is chiefly concerned with the role of science in our lives; whether human nature exists, and if so, what it tells us about ourselves; the concept of wickedness; and the part that art and religion have to play in telling us about human behaviour and experience.

Mary was born in 1919 in Greenford, the youngest of Cannon Scrutton and his wife Lesley's two children. She was educated at Sommerville College, Oxford and after university began working as a lecturer in the philosophy department at Reading University before moving to the University of Newcastle. She married Geoffrey Midgley, also a philosopher in 1950 and they went on to have three children. Her first philosophical book Beast and Man was published in 1979 when she was 50. Since then she has continued to publish books on a diverse range of issues. Now 86, Mary continues to live in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in the home she shared with her husband Geoffrey, who died in 1997.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a philosopher.
0:23.0	Philosophy, she believes, is like plumbing.
0:35.4	You take it for granted until it goes wrong.
0:38.2	Born at the end of the first world war into a free-thinking intellectual household, she went just before the Second World War up to Oxford,
0:45.8	where she became a friend of Iris Murdoch, and she resisted joining the Communist Party.
0:50.6	Marriage and motherhood in the north of England followed and it wasn't until she was 57 that she published her first book.
0:57.0	Over the last 30 years she staked out a philosophical position all her own, arguing that life is complex, there are no simple answers to
1:06.1	its problems.
1:07.8	Morality depends on unresolved contradictions.
1:10.6	No single discipline, not even science, can provide a perfect solution.
1:15.0	These are the arguments not of a narrow academic, but of a fierce and witty woman who gleefully
1:21.0	declares that she keeps thinking she has nothing more to say and then
1:24.8	finds as she calls it some idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.
1:29.2	She is Mary Midley.
1:31.6	You contradict Mary with great style. it has to be said, you've been called
1:35.2	the foremost scourge of the scientific pretension and the most frightening philosopher of the
1:40.8	century. Are these titles that you enjoy take some pleasure in?
1:45.0	No, I get a little worried when people talk of me as an instrument of destruction
1:50.0	it really not d'aliphe. I think the trouble is that the destructive things I say are
1:57.2	rather simple and when it comes to construction that's always more difficult
	...

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