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Brief Lives

Mary Midgley (1919-2018)

Nat Dyer looks at the humanity of a philosopher who tried to make philosophy more human.

Virtually all the famous philosophers in Western history were lifelong bachelors, pointed out Mary Midgley. Plato, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and more, never married nor lived with children. This helps explain, she said, why European philosophy was so abstract and detached from human life. She spent a lifetime trying to make it breathe again.

Midgley – one of the most important philosophers of recent times – took a different path.

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