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Articles

A Golden Manifesto

Mary Midgley remembers a golden age of female philosophy, and argues that it holds lessons for today.

Was there ever – or could there ever be – such a thing as ‘The Golden Age of Female Philosophy’? Although newspaper headlines aren’t a matter of cosmic importance, this title rather surprised me when it appeared in 2013 over my response to a comment piece in The Guardian, which discussed my writings and those of the three philosophers who had been my close friends at wartime Oxford – Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch.

My first thought was that a golden age would need more than four components. But it turns out that, today, what we four people wrote strikes philosophers increasingly as important.

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