The Somerville Group and (the Re-emergence of) Metaphysics

Activity: Talk or presentation › Presentation

Description

Recently there has been a surge of interest in the so-called ‘Somerville
School’—a group of Oxford-based philosophers including G. E. M. Anscombe, Iris
Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot active from the early 1950’s and
onwards. What has been largely overlooked in this recent surge of scholarship,
however, is the group’s reliance on an understanding of metaphysics as a
descriptive-normative historical enterprise and the distinct form of historical, or
genealogical, argumentation that this understanding brings to the writings of the
group. In this talk I provide a characterisation of this shared understanding of
metaphysics as a historical science, explain how it both threatens a commonly
accepted narrative concerning the re-emergence of metaphysics in analytic
philosophy and gives rise to a distinct form of historical arguments. I also exemplify
these more abstract historiographical and argumentative points by tracking and
explicating these metaphysical concerns and their adjacent argumentative structures
in a number of prominent writings of members of the Somerville School.
Period2024 Oct 11
Event titleIdehistoria på gång 2024
Event typeConference
LocationUmeå, SwedenShow on map
Degree of RecognitionNational

UKÄ subject classification

  • History of Ideas

Free keywords

  • Somerville Group
  • Metaphysics
  • History of post-war British philosophy
  • Iris Murdoch
  • G. E. M. Anscombe
  • Philippa Foot
  • Mary Midgley
  • R. G. Collingwood
  • Donald MacKinnon
  • P. F. Strawson

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