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Mary Midgley

Analytic · Europe · 1919 to 2018

British philosopher who held that morals grow from our shared nature and feelings, and who warned against grand scientific myths.

What it is

Mary Midgley (1919 to 2018) was a British moral philosopher who wrote about ethics, science, human nature and animals. She is known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights, and for her sharp criticism of reductionism and scientism, the habit of treating science as the only source of truth.

She taught philosophy at Newcastle University, and she raised three sons with her husband Geoffrey, who was also a philosopher. She began publishing books late, around the age of sixty, with Beast and Man in 1978; her last book, What Is Philosophy For?, came out in 2018, the year she died aged 99.

The main ideas

  • Against reductionism and scientism. She opposed the idea that everything can be explained by breaking it into its smallest parts, and the claim that science alone tells us the truth. She argued that philosophy and the sciences should complement each other, and she opposed any attempt to make science a substitute for the humanities.
  • Philosophy as plumbing. Our thinking rests on assumptions we rarely look at. Like pipes under a floor, they are noticed only when bad smells start to rise. Philosophy, she said, is the work of taking up the floorboards and looking.
  • Philosophy for everyone. She did not treat philosophy as a trade for specialists. It is something all people do when they try to make sense of their lives.
  • Questioning grand scientific stories. She criticised the selfish gene idea, arguing that it turns a complex picture of living things into a story of isolated individuals.
  • Gaia. She supported the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that the Earth can be seen as a living system, and thought it a fruitful suggestion.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone reading a headline that says a gene explains a whole kind of behaviour. Midgley would invite that person to ask what picture of human beings lies underneath the claim, and what it leaves out. This is an illustration of her style of questioning, not an example from her writing.

Books and moments

  • Beast and Man (1978) was her first book, published when she was around sixty.
  • The Solitary Self (2010) takes up the idea of the isolated individual in science and in philosophy.
  • Are You An Illusion? (2014) is one of her late books on mind, brain and the limits of scientific accounts.
  • What Is Philosophy For? (2018) was her last book, published in the year she died.

Questions and criticism

  • Is she fair to science? She argued against a one-sided picture of science. Readers can ask whether the scientists she criticised held the views she gave them.
  • Does philosophy as plumbing say enough? If philosophy mostly repairs hidden assumptions, some ask whether it should also build positive answers.
  • Writing for everyone. She argued that philosophy is not reserved for intellectuals and academics. Readers can ask what that gains and what it costs in precision.

Close neighbours

The pages on Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch cover other British women who wrote on ethics in the same century. The page on Peter Singer covers a philosopher who also wrote about how we treat animals.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 30 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Iris Murdoch · She belonged to the same circle of women philosophers at Oxford and shared her view of moral life. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Analytic thinkers

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