The biographical aspect of Lipscomb’s book is excellent. One of them, Mary Midgely, explained that it was only possible because the men were off at war, their absence making it “a great deal easier for a woman to be heard in discussion … Sheer loudness of voice has a lot to do with the difficulty, but there is also a temperamental difference about confidence – about the amount of work that one thinks is needed to make one’s opinion worth hearing.” Each would become a renowned philosopher, making their way in an academic world unwelcoming to women. Four brilliant Oxford undergraduate women were able to flourish in the early 1940s. Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics is a welcome corrective to that male-dominant narrative. (Freddie) Ayer, John Austin, Richard Hare, and Herbert Hart practiced a kind of conceptual analysis. Many would think that the finest decades of Oxford philosophy were the post war period, the Oxford of linguistic philosophy, where Gilbert Ryle, A.J. Cheryl Misak reviews Benjamin Lipscomb's welcome corrective to a narrative that centers men at the heart of post-war Oxford philosophy.
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