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 revisionary historical
enterprise and the distinct form of historical, or genealogical, argumentation that this
understanding results in. 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.

Period	2024 Jun 8
Event title	The 2024 Swedish Congress of Philosophy
Event type	Conference
Location	Gothenburg, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International