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

Beskrivning

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 juni 8
Evenemangstitel	Filosofidagarna i Göteborg 2024
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Gothenburg, SverigeVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell