Mary Midgley

Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley
Full name Mary Midgley
Born 13 September 1919 (1919-09-13) (age 92)
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Moral philosophy
Main interests Human nature, animal rights, science

Mary Midgley, née Scrutton (born September 13, 1919), is an English moral philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and is known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast And Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978), when she was in her fifties. It was followed by several others, including Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (1981), Animals And Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984) and The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (1994). She was awarded an honorary D. Litt by Durham University in 1995. Her autobiography,The Owl Of Minerva, was published in 2005.

She has written extensively about what philosophers can learn from nature, particularly from animals. A number of her books and articles have discussed philosophical ideas appearing in popular science, including those of Richard Dawkins. She has also written in favour of a moral interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis.

The Guardian has described her as a fiercely combative philosopher and the UK's "foremost scourge of 'scientific pretension'".[1]

Contents

Early life and education

Midgley's father was a King's College chaplain.

Midgley was born in London to Lesley and Tom Scrutton. Her father was a curate in Dulwich, and later chaplain of King's College, Cambridge, and she was raised in Cambridge, Greenford, and Ealing. She was educated at Downe House School in Cold Ash, Berkshire, where she developed her interest in classics and philosophy:

“ [A] new and vigorous Classics teacher offered to teach a few of us Greek, and that too was somehow slotted into our timetables. We loved this and worked madly at it, which meant that with considerable efforts on all sides, it was just possible for us to go to college on Classics … I had decided to read Classics rather than English – which was the first choice that occurred to me – because my English teacher, bless her, pointed out that English literature is something that you read in any case, so it is better to study something that you otherwise wouldn’t. Someone also told me that, if you did Classics at Oxford, you could do Philosophy as well. I knew very little about this but, as I had just found Plato, I couldn’t resist trying it.[2] ”
She read Greats at Oxford, going up to Somerville in 1938.

She took the Oxford entrance exam in the autumn of 1937, gaining a place at Somerville College. During the year before starting university, it was arranged that she would live in Austria for three months to learn German, but she had to leave after a month because of the worsening political situation. At Somerville, she studied Mods and Greats alongside Iris Murdoch, graduating with a first-class honours degree.

Several of her lasting friendships that began at Oxford were with scientists, and she credits them with having educated her in a number of scientific disciplines.[3] After a split in the Labour club at Oxford over the Soviet Union’s actions, she was on the committee of the newly formed Democratic Socialist Club alongside Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins. She writes that her career in philosophy may also have been affected by women having a greater voice in discussion at the time, because many male undergraduates left after a year to fight in the Second World War: "I think myself that this experience has something to do with the fact that Elizabeth [Anscombe] and I and Iris [Murdoch] and Philippa Foot and Mary Warnock have all made our names in philosophy ... I do think that in normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn't get heard.[4]

Academic life

Midgley's first book, Beast and Man, was published when she was in her late fifties.

After leaving Oxford, she worked for the civil service, and as a teacher at Downe School and Bedford School. She returned to Oxford in 1947 to work for Gilbert Murray. In 1949, she went to Reading University, teaching in the philosophy department there. She married Geoffrey Midgley in 1950 (he died in 1997), and they moved to Newcastle and had three sons. Both she and her husband taught for many years at Newcastle University, and she still lives in the city. During this time, she began studying ethology and this led to her first book, Beast and Man, which was published when she was 59. "I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didn't know what I thought before then."[1]

Ideas and arguments

Midgley sees philosophy as plumbing, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong. "Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers ... noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with."[5]

Despite her Christian upbringing, Midgley is not a Christian,[1] though she also argues that the world's religions should not simply be ignored: "It turns out that the evils which have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of."[6]

Midgley's first book, Beast and Man (1978), was an examination of human nature and a reaction against the perceived reductionism of sociobiology, and the relativism and behaviorism she saw as prevalent in much of social science. She argued that human beings are more similar to animals than many social scientists then acknowledged, while animals are in many ways more sophisticated than humans. Midgley later criticized the belief that humans could be understood in terms of their genetic make-up, as she interpreted Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976) to suggest. Instead, she argued that human beings and their relationship with animals could be better understood by using the qualitative methods of ethology and comparative psychology.

Writing in the 2002 introduction to the reprint of her Evolution as a Religion (1985), Midgley reports that she wrote both this book, and the later Science as Salvation (1992) to counter the "quasi-scientific speculation"[7] of "certain remarkable prophetic and metaphysical passages that appeared suddenly in scientific books, often in their last chapters."[8] The first book dealt with the theories of evolutionary biologists, including Dawkins, and the second book with physicists and artificial intelligence researchers. Midgley writes that she still believes that these theories, "have nothing to do with any reputable theory of evolution,"[9] and will not solve the real social and moral problems the world is facing, either through genetic engineering or the use of machines. She concludes: "These schemes still seem to me to be just displacement activities proposed in order to avoid facing our real difficulties."[9] "In exposing these rhetorical attempts to turn science into a comprehensive ideology," she wrote in 2003, "I am not attacking science but defending it against dangerous misconstructions."

On reductionism and materialism

She argues against reductionism, or the attempt to impose any one approach to understanding the world. She suggests that there are "many maps, many windows," arguing that "we need scientific pluralism—the recognition that there are many independent forms and sources of knowledge—rather than reductivism, the conviction that one fundamental form underlies them all and settles everything." She writes that it is helpful to think of the world as "a huge aquarium. We cannot see it as a whole from above, so we peer in at it through a number of small windows ... We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles. but if we insist that our own window is the only one worth looking through, we shall not get very far."[10]

She argues that, "acknowledging matter as somehow akin to and penetrated by mind is not adding a new ... assumption ... it is becoming aware of something we are doing already." She suggests that "this topic is essentially the one which caused Einstein often to remark that the really surprising thing about science is that it works at all ... the simple observation that the laws of thought turn out to be the laws of things."[11]

Midgley–Dawkins debate

In volume 53 (1978) of Philosophy, the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, J. L. Mackie published an article entitled The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and Principles of Evolution, praising Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, and discussing how its ideas might be applied to moral philosophy.[12]

Midgley responded in volume 54 (1979) with "Gene-Juggling," an article arguing that The Selfish Gene was about psychological egoism, rather than evolution.[13] The paper criticized Dawkins' concepts, but was judged by its targets to be intemperate and personal in tone, and as having misunderstood Dawkins' ideas. However, Midgley has disputed this view, pointing out that while Dawkins purports to be talking about genes - that is chemical arrangements, he nonetheless slides over to saying that 'we are born selfish' (The Selfish Gene, p.3). As Midgley points out, there is a major difference between 'us' and 'our genes'.

She wrote that she had previously "not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to "break a butterfly upon a wheel. But Mr Mackie’s article is not the only indication I have lately met of serious attention being paid to his fantasies."[13] In a rejoinder in 1981, Dawkins retorted that the comment was "hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic".[14] He wrote that she "raises the art of misunderstanding to dizzy heights. My central point had no connection with what she alleges. I am not even very directly interested in man, or at least not in his emotional nature. My book is about the evolution of life, not the ethics of one particular, rather aberrant, species."[14]

In volume 58, "Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism" (1983), Midgley replied again, saying: "Apology is due, not only for the delay but for the impatient tone of my article. One should not lose one’s temper, and doing so always makes for confused argument...[but] My basic objections remain."[15]

The bad feeling between Dawkins and Midgley caused by this affair apparently remains. In a note to page 55 in the 2nd edition of The Selfish Gene (1989), Dawkins refers to Midgley's "highly intemperate and vicious paper". Midgley, meanwhile, has continued to criticize Dawkins' ideas. In her books Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears (2002) and The Myths We Live By (2003), she writes about what she sees as his confused use of language — the sleight of hand involved in using terms such as "selfish" in different ways without alerting the reader to the change in meaning — and some of what she regards as his rhetoric ("genes exert ultimate power over behaviour"), which she argues is more akin to religion than science. She wrote in a letter to The Guardian in 2005:

[There is] widespread discontent with the neo-Darwinist — or Dawkinsist — orthodoxy that claims something which Darwin himself denied, namely that natural selection is the sole and exclusive cause of evolution, making the world therefore, in some important sense, entirely random. This is itself a strange faith which ought not to be taken for granted as part of science.[16]

In an interview with The Independent in September 2007, she argued that Dawkins' views on evolution are ideologically driven: "The ideology Dawkins is selling is the worship of competition. It is projecting a Thatcherite take on economics on to evolution. It's not an impartial scientific view; it's a political drama."[17] In April 2009, Midgley reiterated her critical interpretation of The Selfish Gene as part of a series of articles on Hobbes in The Guardian.[18]

In her 2010 book The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene she argues that "simple one-sided accounts of human motives, such as the "selfish gene" tendency in recent neo-Darwinian thought, may be illuminating but are always unrealistic".[19]

Midgley in fiction

Midgley is referred to in "The Lives of Animals," an unusual fictional work by the prominent South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. "The Lives of Animals" has been likened to a cross between a short story and a philosophical dialogue, as Coetzee's protagonist often speaks at length about philosophical ideas. Many reviewers expressed bafflement at the text, which has an enigmatic and riddling style. As one reviewer noted, "the reader is not quite sure whether he is intended to spot some confusion or contradiction or non sequitur in [the protagonist’s] arguments." [20] Other critics however have noted many affinities between "The Lives of Animals" and Midgley's philosophy, and have used Midgley's ideas to make sense of Coetzee's famously confusing work.

Coetzee's protagonist for example is concerned with the moral status of animals, a subject Midgley addressed in Animals and Why They Matter. Coetzee's protagonist also discusses at length the idea of sympathy as an ethical concept, a subject Midgley wrote about in Beast and Man. As one critical analysis puts it, the result of these and other similarities is that Coetzee's work "evoke[s] a particular conception of ethics, one very similar to that of the philosopher Mary Midgley. Such a view affords a central role to sympathy and is fundamentally opposed to a long-standing rival view, most clearly exemplified by the social contract tradition, which prioritizes an instrumental conception of rationality."[21]

Coetzee and Midgley additionally share a longstanding fascination with Robinson Crusoe. Coetzee retells the Crusoe story in his novel Foe, while Midgley writes about Crusoe in her essay "Duties Concerning Islands." Midgley's essay argues for the idea that human beings can have ethical obligations to non-human entities such as animals and ecosystems, an idea that is also found in "The Lives of Animals," Foe and many other works by Coetzee.[22]

Portrait of Mary Midgley

Midgley agreed to sit for sculptor Jon Edgar in Newcastle during 2006, as part of The Environment Triptych[23] along with heads of Richard Mabey and James Lovelock.

Publications

Books

Pamphlets

Selected articles

  • The Emancipation of Women (1952) The Twentieth Century CLII, No. 901, pp. 217–25
  • Bishop Butler: A Reply (1952) The Twentieth Century CLII, No. 905
  • Ou Sont les Neiges de ma Tante (1959) The Twentieth Century, pp. 168–79
  • Is "Moral" Dirty Word? (1972) Philosophy 47, No 181, pp. 206–228 JSTOR 3750150
  • The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour (1973) Philosophy 48, No. 148, pp. 111–135 JSTOR 3749836
  • The Neutrality of the Moral Philosopher (1974) Supplementary Volume of the Aristotelian Society, pp. 211–29 JSTOR 4544857
  • The Game Game (1974) Philosophy 49, No. 189, pp. 231–253 JSTOR 3750115
  • On Trying Out One's New Sword on a Chance Wayfarer (1977) The Listener (Reprinted in Midgley, Mary Heart and Mind (1981) and MacKinnon, Barbara Ethics, Theory and Contemporary Issues (Third Edition 2001))
  • More about Reason, Commitment and Social Anthropology (1978) Philosophy 53, No. 205, pp. 401–403 JSTOR 3749907
  • The Objection to Systematic Humbug (1978) Philosophy 53, No. 204, pp. 147–169 JSTOR 3749425
  • Freedom and Heredity (1978) The Listener (Reprinted in Midgley, Mary Heart and Mind (1981))
  • Brutality and Sentimentality (1979) Philosophy 54, No. 209, pp. 385–389 JSTOR 3750611
  • The All-Female Number (1979) Philosophy 54 No. 210, pp. 552–554 JSTOR 3751049
  • Gene-Juggling (1979) Philosophy 54, No. 210, pp. 439–458 JSTOR 3751039
  • The Absence of a Gap between Facts and Values (with Stephen R. L. Clark) (1980) Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 54, pp. 207–223+225-240 JSTOR 4106784
  • Consequentialism and Common Sense (1980) The Hastings Center Report 10, No. 5, pp. 43–44 doi:10.2307/3561052
  • Why Knowledge Matters (1981) Animals in Research: New Perspectives in Animal Experimentation ed. David Sperling
  • Human Ideals and Human Needs (1983) Philosophy 58, No. 223, pp. 89–94 JSTOR 3750521
  • Towards a New Understanding of Human Nature: The Limits of Individualism (1983) How Humans Adapt: A Biocultural Odyssey ed. Donald J. Ortner
  • Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism (1983) Philosophy 58, No. 225, pp. 365–377 JSTOR 3750771
  • Duties Concerning Islands (1983) Encounter LX (Reprinted in People, Penguins and Plastic Trees (1986) ed. Donald Vandeveer also in Ethics (1994) ed. Peter Singer and Environmental Ethics (1995) ed. Robert Elliot)
  • De-Dramatizing Darwin (1984) The Monist '67, No. 2
  • Persons and Non-Persons (1985) In Defense of Animals, pp. 52–62
  • Can Specialist Damage Your Health? (1987) International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 2, No. 1
  • Keeping Species on Ice (1987) Beyond the Bars: the Zoo Dilemma ed.Virginia MacKenna, Will Travers and Jonathan Wray
  • The Flight from Blame (1987) Philosophy 62, No. 241, pp. 271–291 JSTOR 3750837
  • Evolution As A Religion: A Comparison of Prophecies (1987) Zygon 22, No. 2, pp. 179–194 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.1987.tb00845.x
  • Embarrassing Relatives: Changing Perceptions of Animals (1987) The Trumpter 4, No. 4, pp. 17–19
  • Beasts, Brutes and Monsters (1988) What Is An Animal? ed. Tim Ingold
  • Teleological Theories of Morality (1988) An Encyclopaedia of Philosophy ed. G.H.R. Parkinson
  • On Not Being afraid of Natural Sex Differences (1988) Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford
  • Practical Solutions (1988) The Hastings Center Report 19, No. 6, pp. 44–45 doi:10.2307/3561992
  • Myths of Intellectual Isolation (1988-9) Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LXXXIX, Part 1
  • The Value of "Useless" Research: Supporting Scholarship for the Long Run (1989) Report by the Council for Science and Society
  • Are You an Animal? (1989) Animal Experimentation: The Consensus Changes ed. Gill Langley
  • Why Smartness is Not Enough (1990) Rethinking the Curriculum; Towards an Integrated, Interdisciplinary College Education ed. Mary E. Clark and Sandra A. Wawritko
  • Homunculus Trouble, or, What is Applied Philosophy? (1990) Journal of Social Philosophy 21, No. 1, pp. 5–15 doi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.1990.tb00262.x
  • The Use and Uselessness of Learning (1990) European Journal of Education 25, No.3, pp. 283–294 doi:10.2307/1503318
  • Rights-Talk Will Not Sort Out Child-abuse; Comment on Archard on Parental Rights (1991) Journal of Applied Philosophy 8, No. 1 doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.1991.tb00411.x
  • The Origin of Ethics (1991) A Companion To Ethics ed. Peter Singer (Available in Spanish here)
  • Is the Biosphere a Luxury? (1992) The Hastings Center Report 22, No. 3, pp. 7–12 doi:10.2307/3563291
  • Towards a More Humane View of the Beasts? (1992) The Environment in Question ed. David E. Cooper and Joy A. Palmer
  • The Significance of Species (1992) The Moral Life ed. Stephen Luper-Foy and Curtis Brown (Reprinted in The Animal Rights/ Environmental Ethics Debate, The Environmental Perspective (1992) ed. Eugene C. Hargrove)
  • Strange Contest, Science versus Religion (1992) The Gospel and Contemporary Culture ed. Hugh Montefiore
  • Philosophical Plumbing (1992) The Impulse to Philosophise ed. A. Phillips Griffiths
  • The idea of Salvation Through Science (1992) New Blackfriars 73, No. 860, pp. 257–265 doi:10.1111/j.1741-2005.1992.tb07240.x
  • Can Science Save its Soul (1992) New Scientist, pp. 43–6
  • Beasts versus the Biosphere (1992) Environmental Values 1, No. 1, pp. 113–21
  • The Four-Leggeds, The Two-Leggeds and the Wingeds (1993) Society and Animals 1, No. 1.
  • Visions, Secular and Sacred (1994) Milltown Studies 34, pp. 74–93
  • The End of Anthropocentrism? (1994) Philosophy and the Natural Environment ed. Robin Attfield and Andrew Belsey
  • Darwinism and Ethics (1994) Medicine and Moral Reasoning ed. K.W.M. Fulford, Grant Gillett and Janet Martin Soskice
  • Bridge-Building at Last (1994) Animals and Human Society ed. Aubrey Manning and James Serpell
  • Zombies and the Turing Test (1995) Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, No. 4, pp. 351–2
  • Reductive Megalomania (1995) Nature's Imagination; The Frontiers of Scientific Vision ed. John Cornwall
  • Trouble with Families? (1995) Introducing Applied Ethics ed. Brenda Almond (Joint with Judith Hughes)
  • The Challenge of Science, Limited Knowledge, or a New High Priesthood? (1995) True to this Earth ed. Alan Race and Roger Williamson
  • The Mixed Community (1995) Earth Ethics, Environmental Ethics, Animal Rights and Practical Applications ed. James P. Serba
  • Visions, Secular and Sacred (1995) The Hastings Center Report 25, No. 5, pp. 20–27 doi:10.2307/3562790
  • Darwin's Central Problems (1995) Science 268, No. 5214, pp. 1196–1198 doi:10.1126/science.268.5214.1196
  • The Ethical Primate. Anthony Freeman in discussion with Mary Midgley (1995) Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, No. 1, pp. 67–75(9) (Joint with Anthony Freeman)
  • Sustainability and Moral Pluralism (1996) Ethics and The Environment 1, No. 1
  • One World - But a Big One (1996) Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, No. 5/6
  • Earth Matters; Thinking about the Environment (1996) The Age of Anxiety ed. Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter
  • The View from Britain: What is Dissolving Families? (1996) American Philosophical Association, Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 96, No. 1 (Joint with Judith Hughes)
  • Can Education be Moral? (1996) Res Publica II, No. 1 doi:10.1007/BF02335711 (Reprinted in Teaching Right and Wrong, Moral Education in the Balance ed Richard Smith and Paul Standish)
  • Science in the World (1996) Science Studies 9, No. 2
  • The Myths We Live By (1996) The Values of Science Oxford Amnesty Lectures ed Wes Williams
  • Visions of Embattled Science (1997) Science Today: Problem or Crisis? ed Ralph Levinson and Jeff Thomas
  • The Soul's Successors: Philosophy and the "Body" (1997) Religion and the Body ed Sarah Coakley
  • Putting Ourselves Together Again (1998) Consciousness and Human Human Identity ed John Cornwall
  • Monkey business. The Origin of Species changed man's conception of himself forever. So why, asks Mary Midgley, is Darwinism used to reinforce the arid individualism of our age? (1999) New Statesman
  • The Problem of Humbug (1998) Media Ethics ed Matthew Kieram
  • Descarte's prisoners (1999) New Statesman
  • Being Scientific about Our Selves (1999) Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (Reprinted in Models of the Self (1999) ed Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear)
  • Towards an Ethic of Global Responsibility (1999) Human Rights in Global Politics ed Tim Dunne and Nicholas J. Wheeler
  • The Origins of Don Giovanni (1999–2000) Philosophy Now, p. 32
  • Alchemy Revived (2000) The Hastings Center Report 30, No. 2, pp. 41–43 doi:10.2307/3528314
  • Biotechnology and Monstrosity: Why We Should Pay Attention to the "Yuk Factor" (2000) The Hastings Center Report 30, No. 5, pp. 7–15 doi:10.2307/3527881
  • Earth Song (2000) New Statesman
  • Both nice and nasty (2000) New Statesman
  • Individualism and the Concept of Gaia (2000) Review of International Studies 26, pp. 29–44
  • Consciousness, Fatalism and Science (2000) The Human Person in Science and Theology ed Niels Hendrik Gregerson, Willem B. Drees and Ulf Gorman
  • Human Nature, Human Variety, Human Freedom (2000) Being Humans: Anthropological Universality and Particularity ed Neil Roughley
  • Why Memes? (2000) Alas, Poor Darwin ed Hukary and Steven Rose
  • The Need for Wonder (2000) God for the 21st Century ed Russell Stannard
  • What Gaia Means (2001) The Guardian
  • The bankers' abstract vision of the globe is limited (2001) The Guardian
  • The Problem of Living with Wildness (2001) Wolves and Human Communities: Biology, Politics and Ethics ed Virginia A. Sharpe, Bryan Norton and Strachan Donelley
  • Wickedness (2001) The Philosophers' Magazine pp. 23–5
  • Being Objective (2001) Nature 410, p. 753 doi:10.1038/35071193
  • Heaven and Earth, an Awkward History (2001–2002) Philosophy Now 34 p. 18
  • Does the Earth Concern Us? (2001–2002) Gaia Circular, p. 4
  • Choosing the Selectors (2002) Proceedings of the British Academy 112 published as The Evolution of Cultural Entities ed Michael Wheeler, John Ziman and Margaret A. Boden
  • Pluralism: The Many-Maps Model (2002) Philosophy Now 35
  • How real are you? (2002) Think. A Periodical of the Royal Institute of Philosophy
  • Reply to target article: “Inventing the Subject; the Renewal of ’Psychological’ Psychology” (2002) Journal of Anthropological Psychology
  • Enough is never enough (2002) The Guardian
  • It's all in the mind (2002) The Guardian
  • Science and Poetry (2003) Situation Analysis 2 (edited extract from Chapters 17 Individualism and the Concept of Gaia and 18 Gods and Goddesses; the Role of Wonder of Science and Poetry)
  • Great Thinkers - James Lovelock (2003) New Statesman
  • Curiouser and curiouser (2003) The Guardian
  • Fate by fluke (2003) The Guardian
  • Criticising the Cosmos (2003) Is Nature Ever Evil? Religion, Science and Value ed Willem B. Drees
  • Zombies (2003–2004) Philosophy Now pp. 13–14
  • Souls, Minds, Bodies, Planets pt1 and pt2 (2004) Two-part article on the Mind Body problem Philosophy Now
  • Us and Them (2004) New Statesman
  • Counting the cost of revenge (2004) The Guardian
  • Mind and Body: The End of Apartheid (2004) Science, Consciousness and Ultimate Reality ed David Lorimer
  • Why Clones? (2004) Scientific and Medical Network Review, No. 84
  • Visions and Values (2005) Resurgence 228
  • Proud not to be a doctor (2005) The Guardian
  • Designs on Darwinism (2005) The Guardian
  • Review: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006) New Scientist Issue 2572 doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(06)60674-X
  • Rethinking sex and the selfish gene: why we do it (2006) Heredity 96, No. 3, pp. 271–2 doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6800798
  • A Plague On Both Their Houses (2007) Philosophy Now 64
  • Mary Midgley on Dawkins (2007) Interlog
  • Does Science Make God Obsolete? (2008) John Templeton Foundation

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Brown 2001
  2. ^ Midgley 2005, p. 62.
  3. ^ Midgley 2005, pp. 93-94.
  4. ^ Midgley 2005, p. 123.
  5. ^ Else 2001
  6. ^ Midgley 2003, p. 40.
  7. ^ Midgley 1985, p. ix
  8. ^ Midgley 1985, p. iii.
  9. ^ a b Midgley 1985, p. x.
  10. ^ Midgley 2003, pp. 26-27.
  11. ^ Midgley 1992, p. 14.
  12. ^ Mackie 1978
  13. ^ a b Midgley 1979.
  14. ^ a b Dawkins 1981
  15. ^ Midgley 1983
  16. ^ Midgley, 6 September 2005.
  17. ^ Jackson, Nick. "Against the grain: There are questions that science cannot answer", The Independent, January 3, 2008.
  18. ^ Midgley 2009
  19. '^ The Solitary Self publisher's description
  20. ^ David Lodge, "Disturbing the Peace," The New York Review of Books.
  21. ^ Andy Lamey, "Sympathy and Scapegoating in J. M. Coetzee," in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, Anton Leist and Peter Singer eds. (New York: Columbia University Press 2010), p. 172. For similarities between Midley and Coetzee, see pages 175-81.
  22. ^ Lamey, "Sympathy and Scapegoating in J. M. Coetzee," p. 175.
  23. ^ authors, various (2008). Responses - Carvings and Claywork - Jon Edgar Sculpture 2003-2008. UK: Hesworth Press. ISBN 978-0-9558675-0-7. 

References

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