Reading Midgley

 Having read Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good, I thought I might read something by Mary Midgley, whose Wickedness the publisher advertise among other books in the end papers. I did not expect to find her work in the local bookstores I usually rely on. My preferred out-of-town bookstores didn't seem promising, either.

A Little Free Library on New Hampshire Avenue NW yielded The Essential Mary Midgley, edited by David Midgley, which contains excerpts from ten of her books. I am more likely to find some of those books to read than I am to pass along this volume.

The themes that Midgley writes on include

• A rejection of the Cartesian split between mind and matter.
• Related to that, a rejection of the tendency to regard animals as machines, and their treatment as not worth considering.
• Also related, the assertion that humans have a nature, and cannot be considered as acting from arbitrary will.
• The validity of (sound) moral judgments, including the identification of evil and the ascription of blame.
• The need for philosophy in general to clarify our notions, including particularly moral philosophy.
• The misreading and misuse of Darwin's thought.
• The unjustified pretensions of certain scientists who write as public intellectuals.

The book is organized in five sections, each with chapters of about a dozen pages each, the sections being

1. The Roots of Human Nature
2. Philosophizing Out in the World
3. The Myths of Science
4. Reason and Imagination
5. Gaian Thinking: Putting it All Together

 Midgley writes clearly throughout. She requires careful reading, but I recall only one spot where I suspected something omitted in the text. She can be cutting, for example in the notes to the essay "The Elusiveness of Responsibility":

British philosophers, who in many other cases have now relaxed their rule of reading only one book by each philosopher, sternly adhere to it in Kant's case, and treat a few quotations from the rather dramatic opening section of the Groundwork as his last words on individuality and freedom. Both Williams and Nagel take as their chief opponent the resulting shadowy fixture, who is supposed to be Kant, but to whom they amazingly attribute 'a very simple image of rationality.'