Four women who took on the Oxford establishment

The biographical material in Metaphysical Animals is evocative and sparkling

In 1948, four young women, all close friends, met in the Lyons’ tearoom in Oxford to discuss philosophy. In a talk that grew out of that conversation with Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Scrutton (who in two years would become Mary Midgley), Philippa Foot would explain that “the whole of moral philosophy, as it is now widely taught, rests on a contrast between statements of fact and evaluations.” Very simply put, all four women believed that morality had some kind of reality outside of individual feelings and choices and that this reality existed somewhere beyond, behind or beneath the