Calendar

‘The biologist amongst philosophers’: Mary Midgley’s Zoological Approach to Aristotle’s Ethics.

Ellie Robson (Warwick) & Sophia Connell (Notre Dame)

Abstract: The philosophy of Mary Midgley (1919-2018) is in the midst of a scholarly revival. In her early writing, Midgley appears familiar with key texts in Aristotle’s zoological corpus. One of the central aims of this paper is to substantiate this observation and offer reasons to think that the meta-ethical stance developed by Midgley in her first book – Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1978) – was influenced significantly by texts such as Historia Animalium (History of Animals), De Partibus Animalium (Parts of Animals) and De Generatione Animalium (Generation of Animals). This claim will have ramifications for understanding Midgely’s ethics and the tradition of Aristotelian Naturalism more generally. We outline points of convergence and overlap between Midgley’s meta-ethical framework and that found in Aristotle’s zoology corpus and argue on this basis that Midgley’s own reading of Aristotle’s zoology offered her novel avenues for developing a form of Aristotelian naturalism that we coin ‘zoological Aristotelianism naturalism’. This, we argue, offers reasons to think that Midgley’s naturalism constitutes an a distinctive meta ethics with advancement in ethics compared with alternative Aristotelian naturalisms.