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

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 paper 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.

Period	2024 May 15
Event title	Högre seminariet i idé- och lärdomshistoria
Event type	Seminar
Location	LundShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International