Mary Midgley

"This anthology includes carefully chosen selections from Mary Midgley's selling books, including Wickedness, Beast and Man, Science and Poetry and The Myths We Live By. It provides insight into questions she has returned to again and again in her renowned prose, from the roots of human nature, reason and imagination to the myths of science and the importance of holism in thinking about science and the environment."--Jacket.

Mary Midgley argues in her powerful new book that far from being the opposite of science, myth is a central part of it. In brilliant prose, she claims that myths are neither lies nor mere stories but a network of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.

In Utopias, Dolphins and Computers Mary Midgley looks at the chronic difficulty of thinking straight about fundamental problems. She argues, with her customary clarity, warmth of tone and gentle wit, that philosophy offers a way of solving some of the most pressing contemporary problems. Where then does the real world need philosophy? It needs it when we want to consider such issues as environmental sustainability; educational ones such as the separation of teaching from research; and gender problems such as the kind of autonomy women are aiming for. From 'Freedom, Feminism and War' to 'Artificial Intelligence and Creativity', her essays unfailingly identify what is distorting our judgement and so help us see more clearly the dramas unfolding around us.

In her new book, Mary Midgley argues that the unrealistic isolation of mind and body in reductive scientific ideologies still causes painful confusion. Such ideologies present crude pictures which are not good science, since they ignore the manifest importance of the higher human faculties. Neither inside nor outside these crude pictures is there room for any realistic notion of the self. Why should these theories insist on only one kind of answer? There is not just one single legitimate explanation. There are as many answers as there are viewpoints from which questions arise - subjective and objective, practical as well as theoretical. Human morality arises out of human freedom: we are uniquely free beings in that we are aware of our conflicts of motive. But those conflicts and our capacity to resolve them are part of our natural inheritance. Although our selves are in many ways divided, we share the difficult project of wholeness with other organisms. What matters for our freedom is the recognition of our genuine agency, our slight but nevertheless real power to grasp and arbitrate our inner conflicts.

Mary Midgley in this book discusses the high spiritual ambitions which tend to gather around the notion of science, and, in particular, some very odd recent expressions of them. When everyone viewed the world as God's creation, there was no problem about the element of worship involved in studying it, nor about science's function in mapping people's lives. But now these things have grown puzzling. Officially, science claims only the modest function of establishing facts. Yet people still hope for something much vaster and grander from it--the myths by which to shape and support life in an increasingly confusing age. Even in the past, the myths surrounding science were often strange. This book discusses Francis Bacon's bizarre vision of a 'masculine birth of time', in which the seventeenth-century scientists saw themselves as sexual victors over a prostrate Mother Nature. Today, some scientists are again holding up the prize of the conquest of nature, this time through rocketry, genetic engineering and intelligent computers. These will dominate the entire universe and make our species effectively immortal. They claim, too, that human intelligence played an essential part in bringing the universe into existence in the first place. Science as Salvation discusses the function and meaning of such fantasies, which project onto a cosmic scale the biological drama considered in the author's earlier Evolution as a Religion. Taking them seriously as symptoms of a genuine myth-hunger, it suggests that the proper function of science may need to include wider perspectives which would make it plain that such desperate, compensatory dramas are unnecessary.

Philosophers have traditionally concentrated on the qualities that make human beings different from other species. In Beast and Man Mary Midgley, one of our foremost intellectuals, stresses continuities. What makes people tick? Largely, she asserts, the same things as animals. She tells us humans are rather more like other animals than we previously allowed ourselves to believe, and reminds us just how primitive we are in comparison to the sophistication of many animals. A veritable classic for our age, Beast and Man has helped change the way we think about ourselves and the world in which we live.

Memoirs of a German novelist, friend to Hemingway and Koestler, with material on the Spanish Civil War

"Why should anybody take an interest in philosophy? Is it just another detailed study like metallurgy? Or is it similar to history, literature and even religion: a study meant to do some personal good and influence our lives? Mary Midgley addresses these provocative questions in her most up-to-date statement on the various forms of our current intellectual anxieties and confusions and how we might deal with them. In doing so, she provides a robust, yet not uncritical, defence of philosophy and the life of the mind. This defence is expertly placed in the context of contemporary debates about science, religion, and philosophy. It asks whether, in light of rampant scientific and technological developments, we still need philosophy to help us think about the big questions of meaning, knowledge, and value."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

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.

This work exposes the illogical logic of poor doctrines that shelter themselves behind the prestige of science. Midgley examines how science comes to be used as a substitute for religion and points out how badly that role distorts it.