The Owl of Minerva

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Hursthouse's inquiry, "Is everything in the Bible true?" perhaps foreshadowed Mary Midgley’s philosophical journey. Few would have predicted that this curious, nature-loving child would evolve into one of the sharpest critical voices in the West. Set against the backdrop of Vienna before the Nazi invasion in 1938 and the celebratory dance in Trafalgar Square on VE Day seven years later, she studied philosophy at Oxford alongside Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot, forming lasting friendships. Midgley recounts, with vivid humor, their efforts to enliven the dry British philosophical scene of the 1950s, engaging in debates about character, beauty, and rudeness, all while the figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein loomed nearby. Joining the Reading philosophy department in 1949 for GBP400 a year, she effectively doubled its faculty. Her tenure at Newcastle University, where Mike Brearley also taught, ended with the department's closure in the 1980s. Balancing a professional career with family life in the 1950s and 1960s, Midgley’s path diverged from many contemporaries; she nearly became a novelist and only began writing philosophy in her fifties, illustrating the notion that Minerva's owl truly flies at dusk.