PHILOSOPHY · ETHICS
Mary Midgley
Also known as: Mary. Midgley, Midgley Mary
Gillian K. Ferguson (born 1965) is a Scottish poet and journalist, born and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is the creator of Air for Sleeping Fish (Bloodaxe) and the best-seller, Baby: Poems on Pregnancy, Birth and Babies (Canongate, 2001). She won a £25,000 Creative Scotland Award and created a major poetry project exploring the human genome called The Human Genome: Poems on the Book of Life, About her project, she said, "the Genome has remained fascinating throughout; a fantastic, beautiful poem - a magnificent work of Chemistry spanning four billion years of the art of Evolution." The project was praised, including by broadcaster, Andrew Marr of the BBC, Francis Collins, Head of the US Human Genome Project and by philosopher Mary Midgley author of Science and Poetry (Routledge). She has won three writer's bursaries from the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland). Her most recent work is Flora: The Evolution of Eden about man's genetic connection and common ancestor with plants and flowers.
This book is about the problem of evil, but not quite in the traditional sense, since I see it as our problem, not God's.
— from Wickedness
Most acclaimed
Heart and mind
Throughout our lives we are making moral choices. Some decisions simply direct our everyday comings and goings; others affect our individual destinies. How do we make those choices? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from, and how can we make more informed decisions?; Mary Midgley offers us an optimistic and holistic view of what it means to be human, acknowledging the complex interconnections of emotion and intellect while presenting us with the freedom to be ourselves. The author has written a new preface for this edition.
Are you an Illusion
Renowned philosopher Mary Midgley explores the remarkable gap that has opened up between our own understanding of our sense of our self and today's scientific orthodoxy that claims the self to be nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Bringing her formidable acuity and analytic skills to bear, she exposes some very odd claims and muddled thinking on the part of cognitive scientists and psychologists when it comes to talk about the self. Well-known philosophical problems in causality, subjectivity, empiricism, free will and determinism are shown to have been glossed over by scientists claiming that the self is no more than a jumble of brain-cells. Midgley argues powerfully and persuasively that the rich variety of our imaginative life cannot be contained in the narrow bounds of a highly puritanical materialism that equates brain and self. The denial of the self has been sustained by the belief that physical science requires it, but there is not just one such pattern of thought but many others which all help to explain the different kinds of problems that arise in our life, argues Midgley. Physics' amazing contemporary successes spring from attacking problems that arise within physics, not from outside. It is no more sensible to give a physical answer to a moral problem than it is to give political answers to physical ones. 'Are you an Illusion?' is an impassioned defence of the importance of our own experiences - the subjective sources of thought - which are every bit as necessary for the world as the objective ones such as brain cells. -- Provided by publisher.