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Obituary
Mary Midgley (September 13, 1919 - October 10, 2018)
Carol Nicholson on a remarkable ethicist and Philosophy Now contributor.
Mary Midgley, one of the leading and most illuminating moral philosophers of our time, published her last book (What is Philosophy For?) only a couple of weeks before her death on October 10 at the age of ninety-nine. Raymond Tallis praised the book as a brilliant, lucid, and witty assault on the distorted world-view of our age and a compelling defence of philosophy as the discipline that is needed to rescue us. Midgley read widely in the history of philosophy as well as in the sciences and the humanities, and she was too open-minded to be affiliated with any particular school of thought. She was celebrated as having one of the sharpest pens in the West, pulling no punches in her criticism of the claims that traditional philosophy is obsolete and that modern science has a monopoly on the truth.
Mary Midgley by Gail Campbell 2018
After raising three sons with her husband Geoffrey Midgley, also a philosophy teacher, Midgley taught at Newcastle University for many years, and it was not until near the age of sixty that she began writing the work that would make her famous.
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