Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Benjamin Lipscomb is professor of Philosophy at Houghton University. He earned his PhD from the University of Notre Dame. He is an accomplished scholar and author who specializes in contemporary ethical theory and the history of philosophy with a particular focus on issues of character formation. His recent book, The Women Are Up To Something, tells the story of four women who reshaped ethics and philosophy in the 20th century, and that book is the topic of our conversation today.
Professor Lipscomb, welcome to Thinking in Public.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Oh, thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Albert Mohler:
I have to say, I think your book title is one of the very best of any recent release, certainly in the field of intellectual history and philosophy. You entitled the book, the Women Are Up to Something. So first of all, who are they and what in the world are they up to?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
I should give credit to my acquaintance at the University of Chicago, Candace Vogler, who said, this is what your title should be, but I love it too. The women are Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch, who all meet up at Oxford right at the beginning of the Second World War. They’re born right after the First World War, and this sets them up to be about 18, about when war is breaking out again and they cross paths there under really unusual circumstances when the men have volunteered or been conscripted away and suddenly the character of the university changes overnight and they get a kind of mentoring and encouragement possibilities open up for them that I think it’s reasonable to say wouldn’t have if it had been five years earlier even.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it is a fascinating moment in history. I think it’s great to kind of lay the historical foundations for an intellectual development here. So you’re talking about colleges and in particular residential colleges in the Oxbridge system and in particular at Oxford. And it had not been that long since women were denied even admission to those colleges.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
There had been women’s colleges since the late 19th century, I think 1870, I’m going to get the date wrong, 1879-ish when Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall opened the first of these women’s societies, but no degrees can be granted until 1919. It’s right after the First World War when I think an acknowledgement of all the things women had been doing in British society, it felt too absurd to go on denying them the right to degrees. Though I have to then say Cambridge didn’t begin granting women degrees until the late 1940s, but they are-
Albert Mohler:
Harvard University, very close to that by the way.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
And they understand themselves to be on probation. And there’s a moment in the book where I quote one of the officers of Somerville College where three of the four of these women went saying, you need to understand the women are on probation at this university that you might think you just act for yourself, but in fact, everyone’s looking at you, everyone’s making judgment about women at Oxford. This isn’t a settled thing, though we wish it were.
Albert Mohler:
In terms of the historical chronology here, World War I was not just an occasion for women to be unusually integrated into the economy, especially there in Britain and into vocational life. It also represented a death toll among young men that was one of the first in human history and one of the last to have been so disproportionately lethal to the elite. And so, you think about Harrow, Eaton, Oxford, Cambridge, and the other most elite schools, the death toll of the officer class in World War I was so horrifying that it wasn’t just men that went off to wars that so many of them never came home.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah, it’s true. It’s talked about sometimes as a lost generation, the point can be overstated, I did a little calculation on the back of an envelope when I was asking, okay, all of these women had officers for fathers, how likely is it that all of their fathers would’ve come home? And the odds were about even, but still 17% of your officer class is a devastating toll, and it was very unevenly distributed there. The story has been told many times of how whole communities would send off their men together and thinking of morale, the British army allowed these villages to serve together. And so if there was a devastating attack, a whole village could lose its entire young men.
Albert Mohler:
Just horrifying and then this strange interregnum between the wars, and then as we are reminded in Abraham, Lincoln’s language war came, in this case the second world war. And as it came, once again, Oxford and Cambridge were basically emptied out not only by the way many students, but many professors as well drawn into the military intelligence and other defense apparatus.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Classics it turned out was, wouldn’t necessarily suppose this, but a field that blended itself well to reapplication and military intelligence. There’s a great biography that I’m anticipating coming out before too long of Dale Austin, very famous classics and philosophy professor at Oxford who spends his whole war up in Bletchley Park doing code breaking.
Albert Mohler:
That afforded the college as an opportunity but also it was a tremendous challenge because there really was a sense in which it was hard to imagine how some of those residential colleges could continue during the war and so how did that happen? In fact, one of the big issues, I was at Oxford as a studying in 1986, and there were still people there then who were quite aware of the deprivations during the war when it often seemed unlikely that some of this could continue.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
How did they continue at all? Well, I mean these are places, the men’s colleges particularly, that have some accumulated means and can weather a storm. But another thing to emphasize here is the government was allowing some officers and others to go through, particularly on short courses. And so the traditional population of men is gone, but there’s also these sort of RAF cadres coming through for little targeted short courses and then right off again.
Albert Mohler:
And casualties, men who have been wounded, who would find their way eventually back to the universities.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yes. The wounded, the conscientious objectors, the ordinances, anybody who is going through a course judged of special strategic importance, people on short courses bound for the officer corps, this odd collection of men, but suddenly, particularly in longer courses like the classics philosophy curriculum, which takes four years, that it’s kind of just the women who are left.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And they were up to something. So kind of take us into that. So why was philosophy in this particular time for this generation of young women such an attractive intellectual discipline?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
It didn’t have to be. That’s the first thing to say that the dominant school of philosophy at this time, what philosophy meant popularly and in many circles within the academy was the positivism of a AJ Ayer. A view that all there is the deliverances of the hard sciences, and if philosophy is for anything, it’s just for cleaning up the language with which we express logical and scientific truth-
Albert Mohler:
Establishing rules.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah, the title of Ayer’s book is really telling here, language, truth, and logic. We’re going to analyze language so as to articulate very plain, humdrum scientific truths and logical principles. And that’s it. As Frank Ramsey said, “Ethics was judged to be a subject without an object.” And so the political questions that are so hot and pressing for people who are themselves having to decide what to do about Hitler, who had to decide a few years before that, what to do about Franco in Spain and whose peers are making these same decisions. Politics is so consuming a concern and philosophy is turned clean away from it. I think that it’s a testament to the power and example that a mentor can have that these four go into philosophy.
I will make an immediate exception for Elizabeth Anscombe who converts to Catholicism at age 15 over the objections to the horror of her family and she was going to be a philosopher no matter what. But the other three, it’s their theologian, philosopher, tutor Donald McKinnon who swims against the current, who thinks unfashionable thoughts, who remains interested in understanding evil in the world and in thinking metaphysically in a way that you were not supposed to do if you were a fashionable philosopher at that time. And they come under McKinnon’s tutelage, and this is redirecting for them.
Albert Mohler:
This generalization is sometimes Oxford and Cambridge, but the two have very different personalities. And Oxford in particular with analytic philosophy or analytical philosophy depending on which side of the pond may be on. But also it was not just philosophy, it was also law. I think of HLA heart and others who held to such a positive misunderstanding of law and an absolute division between the law and morality, just stating that the law makes absolutely no moral claims and is based upon no morality. It’s just a like a game of rules. These are the rules, but no one’s claiming that comport to a correspond moral reality, analytical philosophy, very similar in terms of Ayer. I mean again, there is no objective truth to be known unless it’s a mathematical formula.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Right. Ethics is a matter of expressing what side we are on practical matters, cheering or booing with respect to what we see happen in the world, what we fear or hope will happen in the world. It’s not something that can be assessed as more or less accurate, more or less correct, there’s no answerability to the world or to truth there.
Albert Mohler:
So let’s put that in context before we turn to the women who were up to something. I mean it’s hard to imagine a period in modern history, let’s just say the last 300 years, it’s just hard to imagine a moment in which it was less sustainable to argue that ethics has no content than in the period between the two world wars.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. An early reviewer of the book, Cheryl Misk said in her review, well, obviously R.M Hare Richard Hare, who becomes the kind of professional antagonist to these four women as they are trying to articulate to themselves and to others what moral truth could be like, how we could make sense of that. Hare has this enormous following and he himself has been through horrors as a prisoner of war in Burma. So it’s got to be that there’s some existential pull to this ethics is unreal kind of position. And I think there is, I talk about this in the book, there is a kind of attraction to the idea of facing down the bleakness of it all and being brave enough, what’s the word I want, unconsoled enough to see things the hard and horrible way they are and face them. And so I think maybe a special for a prisoner of war who’d been through it to say, yes, none of this is real. All we have is the stake we turn in the ground. There is nothing but ourselves and the commitments we band together around, there’s something at some level really unsatisfying about that. But I’ve been trying in charity to say, what’s the attraction there? I think maybe that’s something like it.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, it’s just interesting to look in contrast at the world of theology at the time, because the big movement gaining ground between the two wars and especially on the continent is neo orthodoxy. And neo orthodoxy is rejecting the optimism, the moral optimism of liberalism because of the killing fields of World War I. It’s really interesting that at the same time, in contrast of philosophy, kind of giving up on value judgments.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
And it starts early in interwar period, I’m sure you’ve read Lewis The Abolition of Man, where he talks about this sort of upper forms language arts textbook that is making these sorts of claims that any judgment of value is just a kind of expression of preference.
Albert Mohler:
Men without chess, without the moral capacity, but he was using an odd physiology to make that point. They have hearts and they feel and they have minds, they think, but nothing to relate the to. All right, so these women end up at and among many, so you have four very influential women, each of whom but not equally became famous in the field of philosophy. I think of Iris Murdoch I think most people would think of her as a novelist, not as a philosopher, but then again, if you read her novels as I have, there’s an incredible background of philosophical sophistication in them.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah, it’s interesting to read her interviews where she talks about her novels and denies vehemently that their expressions of her philosophy, and I guess I can take her point, they’re not didactic novels. I mean, thank goodness they’re not like the novels of I Rand where you have these characters making great speeches, which are obviously self inserts for the author, but they are full of her reflection on philosophical themes and you can trace all sorts of connections to the things she’s puzzling through, but she is a very influential essayist. There’s a book that came out, oh, I want to say about 10 years ago by Justin Brooks from Brown University and edited collection Iris Murdoch philosopher, in which including some people like Charles Taylor, enormously famous talk about what a difference Iris Murdoch’s few little collections of essays made in shaping and redirecting their thought. What she’s wonderful at is imaginative casting, getting people to approach a whole set of questions in a new way.
Albert Mohler:
Even her novels, I’d simply have to say, my first thought when I read the very first of her novels is it’s hard to imagine a group of this many different characters who think this deeply about things.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah, they all kind of like people who went to university together having the conversations they were having Oxford.
Albert Mohler:
Amazingly enough. Yeah. And by the way, again, one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century. So in other words what she did, she did extremely well.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
I want you to tell the story of their relationships. And so how did they end up at Oxford and how do they end up being discussed together?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Okay. They end up at Oxford kind of by different paths. I don’t know how much you want me to fragment this, but Midgley comes from a family where education was an expected thing for the daughters. And so she’s just looking at her options from a quite excellent girl school down house from early on. It’s never a question whether she’s going to go to university. Similarly for Elizabeth Anscombe whose parents were both school teachers and definitely wanted education for their children, but Iris Murdoch, it’s a bit of a reach. Her parents had not been to university and they were upwardly mobile in thinking about getting their daughter into a good preparatory school and then encouraging her to consider this.
And Philippa Foot is my favorite story here. She’s the granddaughter of a US president, Grover Cleveland. Her mother was the last baby born in the White House, I think in the White House literally delivered there. And her mother is married to the younger son of a British aristocrat. And so she’s raised by governess up in North Yorkshire, and higher schooling is very much not what people in her set wanted for their daughters.
Albert Mohler:
Explain that, I interrupted you there. And because that is so counterintuitive, it’s just like the use of the word middle class when we speak about Britain is so generally misunderstood by Americans, but when you’re looking at the lower aristocracy, not to mention the higher, but the lower aristocracy, the thought of sending their daughters to university was just absolutely foreign.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
It’s not respectable that they were to circulate in the county set of dignified, distinguished people take their place as society hostesses and people of distinction who are a bit above it all, and the idea of getting trained to go and do something economically productive, it’s beneath them. And so there’s a wonderful story that I had from Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch’s biographer, who also knew Philipa Foot quite well of the time when Foot had been told by a governess, you really could go to university. And Foot was already quietly within herself rebelling against the life that she was leading at home. And she was very interested in this, set her heart on it, to their credit, her parents did not resist her, but she did have this story of a friend of her mother saying to her, don’t worry dear, because her mother was fretting about her daughter doing something so common, don’t worry dear. She doesn’t look clever. So yes, at least she looked still distinguished in elegance and she hadn’t mucked around in education.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, I mean, it does tell you something about some of the stereotypes that were also established by class very rigidly. For instance, in the United States, there’s some good words on higher education that point out that one of the reasons why, the upper middle class in the United States, why those parents often did not want their daughters going to college or university is that the academic setting would include young men they did not consider suitable. That they could basically arrange a much tighter class association, but once she got to the university, it was doors are wide open.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Oh, that’s fascinating. It’s filling with all kinds of thoughts about the present day situation, which the number of women going to university in the states is much greater than men and the trouble this makes for marriage but absolutely, that would be distraction.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, no, but it does tell us that. I mean, we take for granted right now, and by the way, there are some very deep educational and sociological concerns about the pattern right now. And it’s not that there are too many young women in higher education, there are too few young men. But nonetheless, I think it’s important for us to recognize in the span of human history, even in what we would call higher education, the widespread admission of many women into graduate programs is actually a fairly recent development.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah. And very unevenly distributed among different disciplines. But there’s still a lot of talk about this and rightly so in philosophy. I mean, I teach upper level philosophy courses. I’ve been doing it for 20 years, and the women I teach are terrific. And actually a number of them have gone on to graduate work. And yet you look at the profession as a whole and it’s pretty tilted. Is this about a kind of socially constructed or more deeply rooted disparity of interests? Doesn’t seem to me that as I teach them, but yes, some fields you’ve got a lot more equal balance or tipping the other way.
Albert Mohler:
So the four women were indicative of a larger group of women who both seized and saw the opportunity to pursue what was not only an opportunity for them to study, but also a sense of responsibility that these were fields that needed work and they had something to contribute. And so they enter into the academic study of philosophy. And you mentioned positivism, I mean at a particularly sterile time in the Philosophical Academy, in the English speaking world.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
They love the ideas that, and I’m again needing to say, I’m talking about the three who study with Donald McKinnon. Elizabeth Anscombe, when you’ve got a kid who starts reading 19th century natural theology textbooks in her teenage years and picking apart arguments for God’s existence to see how they can be made better, that kid’s going into philosophy no matter what anybody does or says.
Albert Mohler:
Yes, whether there’s a degree involved, you have a philosopher on your hands.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
But the other three, it’s the intensity of McKinnon’s determination to understand the evil overtaking the world and to create language in which to talk about this comprehending and to think how to address it. I think they are captivated a little bit like Play-Doh is captivated by Socrates, by the example of this person thinking out loud in front of them, and they think that that is important, those questions are important. I don’t think at the first they have some mission to transform a discipline that happens, this is a little bit of a distraction, but I think it’s relevant. I was teaching today about St. Benedict in the early medieval period. He doesn’t set out to preserve literacy in the West. He doesn’t set out to create these islands of order in a sea of chaos. He does that by accident. And I think something similar is true here, that they are gripped by these questions.
They’re determined to go on thinking about these things if they can be allowed to and can make enough money to support themselves doing it, but they have certain preoccupations which then answer to the needs of the philosophical community and of a wider community in that moment. And above all, they become determined, like their mentor to find something more satisfying, more instructive to say about evil in the face of the Holocaust, in the face of the bombs, in the face of political, to multiple all sorts. They want a better vocabulary, a better conceptual vocabulary in which to talk about this. Philipa Foot exemplifies this. She goes and sees the first films coming out of Buchenwald and is just shocked to her core by this and goes and talks to McKinnon, says to him, nothing can ever be the same now, can it? And she said to her, no, nothing can ever be the same. But from that moment, she doesn’t see how right away, none of them do, but they go in with this intuition, Ayer has to be wrong, we’ve got to figure out how.
Albert Mohler:
There has to be content to morality. There has to be some way of expressing truth in moral terms.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yes, there has to be something-
Albert Mohler:
And it starts with you.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
You say then that Hitler had different sentiments than we do.
Albert Mohler:
Right. I think, and I’m a theologian, by the way. I appreciate the fact that McKinnon’s, both a philosopher and a theologian, and as a theologian, I have to say it is really interesting that our attention is so often directed in a way that can be described as moral realism, not by the good, but by the evil. In other words, it’s evil that requires an explanation, an evil on a scale of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and frankly other developments at the same time. Evil focuses the mind in a way that otherwise the mind might never focus.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah, I want to think about that, something to that.
Albert Mohler:
Well, the Odyssey has been the driving issue of much theological even changes in theological method over the course of the 20th century, even of course into the… You can go back to liveness and go back to the 19th century, but in the 20th century, human evil on a scale that human beings had never imagined before. It’s the one reality, every theology, every philosophical, it has to address itself to that evil.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah. What’s the Latin phrase—unde malum—‘why is it like this?’
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Okay, so the four women that you cover and three of them study with McKinnon, Phillipa Foot separately. I’m kind of tempted here to say, let’s talk about the three for a moment and the influence of… But I want you to tell the narrative the way you want to lay it out. In other words, how did they find each other, and what drew the four of them together?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
They find each other because Oxford is a small place and there’s fewer people there, especially in upper level philosophy, lecture halls, right? Murdoch and Midgley start together-
Albert Mohler:
But I understand they become more than close friends. There’s a camaraderie here that’s very deep.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
And it’s kind of wise that Murdoch and Midgley start at Somerville College together in the same year and they’re both doing classics, which is the principle way that you study philosophy at Oxford at this time. You do ancient history and ancient philosophy, and then modern philosophy in this kind of strange but very instructive and fruitful hybrid program. And so they are going through all the same lectures together, going to the same tutorials, going through the curriculum side by side and form a tight friendship that way. Murdoch ends up being the maid of honor in Midgley’s wedding a decade later. Foot and Murdoch become acquainted with one another, really only at the end of their undergraduate years, but quickly form a tight bond and end up rooming together during the war when they’re both doing war work and London and formed this tight lifelong friendship.
Foot is one of the people whose nursing Murdoch, or I should say, giving compassionate leave to her husband when Murdoch is descending into Alzheimer’s at the end of her life. And Midgley and Foot, no one another is people who are just at Somerville together. They’re always sort of casual university friends. I wouldn’t say the two of them are ever particularly tight. And then Anscombe becomes especially close with Foot when they’re colleagues together at Somerville. Anscombe is gone to Hughes College, but ends up being hired on in a research position and Foot joins the faculty at Somerville and they go through most of two decades side by side as the philosophy team at this small but extremely distinguished women’s college and every afternoon talk philosophy until it’s time to go home for supper.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, what a life. I mean, it is a different mode of existence, and parts of it survive in academic life today, but only parts. Okay, so let’s talk the content of their intellectual contribution. So what sets them apart or to ask it again, what exactly were they up to?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Okay. Yeah. I’m resistant, hesitant to use the word school, and some reviewers have said, were they really a school? I think I quote one person saying that in the preface, and it’s become a theme in reviews. I am uncommitted on how school like to make them. They certainly didn’t have a sense of themselves like the Frankfurt School, that they have this mission that they could write a manifesto.
Albert Mohler:
They also weren’t trying to change the world tomorrow.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
No. But they build on one another’s work. All of them in each of them in her own way is set against Ayer’s vision in which there’s no moral truth. And they prod and prompt one another towards, I’m going to use the term ethical naturalism, and that could be misleading because it could suggest a kind of fully secular view, and for some of them it wasn’t for some of them it wasn’t. But what I mean is that ethics is to be understood as for human beings grounded in facts about our created nature. I’m putting it Christianly here, our created nature. But if you didn’t believe in creation, you just talk about our nature. And they are reaching back for and trying to repristinate the views of Aristotle and Aquinas, these great pre-modern moral thinkers who think in terms of virtues and vices, who think in terms of the qualities, the traits that help us to live a rich flourishing life as the kind of creatures we are, doing the kinds of things that we characteristically do as members of our species.
The vices are the traits that get in the way. The virtues are the ones that facilitate human life. And there can be more to say to that than that, particularly for a Christian who thinks that faith, hope and love are the virtues beyond the virtues. But nonetheless, base level is to understand that there’s such a thing as succeeding or failing at what human beings are designed to do. And we can, by recovering that vocabulary, we can help people to see how it could be not absurd to relate values to facts.
Albert Mohler:
Not absurd. I mean the fact that that is the intellectual leap that must be made just tells us a great deal about the sterility of analytical philosophy. And frankly, it was not equal, but it was present on both sides of the Atlantic. And let me ask you, is there any analogy to these four women in terms of American intellectual life?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
I’m not aware of a cluster in the same way of people who go to work on responding to positivism and build off of one another. Really, I think of the rejection of positivist ethics in the United States as coming with John Rolls around 1970 when just he makes a clean break and says, look, we’ve had a civil rights movement. We’ve had an anti-war movement. We’ve been trying to figure out who to allocate dialysis machines to, let’s just talk about justice again as if none of this ever happened, instead of really trying to build a new foundation for talking about ethics.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I was thinking along some of the same lines. In the United States, by the way, as the university culture was not altered to the same degree as was true in the British Isles. For one thing, Roosevelt and the American military elite saw the continuation of the universities as necessary for the war effort. So I mean clearly millions of young men were conscripted and as well as volunteered, but conscripted and sent to war, but a significant number were considered to be necessary for scientific, especially scientific and technological research. And so portions of the American universities actually thrived, whereas in Great Britain, the intellectual class in the military culture there is separated from the universities and kind of what you call military think tanks like Besley Park.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah. There’s a special burden of justification over there akin to the burden of justification that was put on travel. Is your journey really necessary? These science hang up everywhere and you get educated if there was some special reason to keep educating you or if it wasn’t getting in the way.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And again, World War I was experienced so differently on the two sides of the Atlantic, and the Americans got there so late, experienced nothing of the mega death as Hobbs Bellon called it.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Or the sense of existential threat, you’re on this little island, and the Germans are right there.
Albert Mohler:
When people hear the name Elizabeth Anscombe, when evangelical Christians hear that name, you know exactly where they go. The one thing they know about Elizabeth Anscombe is that not only did she enter into a famous debate with CS Lewis, but even CS Lewis believed that she defeated him. And I think again, evangelicals, I know that name now. I think they may also note that name for some other reasons having to do with such things as euthanasia more recently. But let’s come back to CS Lewis for a moment. So how exactly did that happen, and why was it so devastating to CS Lewis himself by his own perception?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Okay. How it happens is Lewis is the faculty advisor to this group that had been around since these women’s undergraduate days, the Socratic Club, which is a wonderful organization. Lewis, and some students and at Chaplain pull this together because they feel rightly like serious theological exploration has not found as much of a place as much of a forum as it should have at a university like Oxford. And so they start sponsoring conversations that are often conversations between believers and unbelievers and it’s this incredibly rich, fertile context. And all four of the women I write about were interested in sometimes engaged with the Socratic.
Elizabeth Anscombe is dragged into… She’d been an attendee, and she really liked how they did business, she loved how they would carry a conversation over from one session to the other. She’s so serious about the life of the mind, but she was very shy about public speaking in the early phases of her career, which is surprising given how pugnacious she could be. But she didn’t seek out these opportunities. But she was coaxed into giving a response to a chapter from Louis’s book on Miracles in which he said that naturalism in a different sense than I’ve been using it is self contradictory, is self-defeating.
And what happens without getting deeply into the weeds here is that Anscombe is one of the best analytic philosophers of the century and finds some genuine technical problems with what Lewis had thought was this airtight little argument that you couldn’t possibly assert an evolutionary origin to human thought processes. Alplanacus has made an argument like this in recent years, acknowledging and taking account of Anscombe’s criticisms, but Lewis isn’t ready for them. He was a philosopher as an undergraduate, and he’s a first rate mind, but his professional specialty is literary theory and Anscombe is operating on a next level in terms of this kind of digging in to implications and he sees it.
It’s a little bit like Salir being able to appreciate Mozart. I don’t like that comparison because Lewis is greater than that. But that experience of being able to perceive that something is so, but not being able to match it yourself. And he was really deeply embarrassed by this, but had the honesty and the humility that he reached out to Anscombe, or rather, he reached out to one of his fellow officers of the Socratic and said, I think we need her to be an ex-president. If she’s defeated me as an apologist, then she should take over. And I think that’s a really impressive moment. And Anscombe noticed this about him, noticed how he revised the chapter when the second edition of Miracles came out and said, that’s a serious person.
Albert Mohler:
And when he wrote the Problem of Pain, wrote in a very different light. About that for a moment, as a theologian, I often find CS Lewis very wanting. In other words, there’s a problem in intellectual categories when you just assume that someone who’s absolutely brilliant in, for instance, English literature or even medieval English literature, which there is no greater mind, frankly, unless it was his colleague and friend JRR Tolkien. In other words, it’s just not translatable necessarily into being a first rate debater in other field. And so again, I have great appreciation for CS Lewis. I find him theologically wanting, but at the same time, he is the most effective communicator on behalf of classical theism in the 20th century. And you mentioned planting, I think planting a far more sophisticated, both philosophically and theologically and far more influential in the academy, but nowhere… I mean people, as much as you admire planting, not spoken of CS Lewis, nor did he write, by the way, science fiction novels for children.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
No. No, he did not. But I want to sort of drive home one lesson about what this shows about Anscombe, because I think it’s a lesson for Christians in their intellectual pursuits. Anscombe was asked by her daughter once, her daughter records this story asking about this debate, and why did you go after him that way, mama? And she said, well, look, we have this duty to the truth. And I take it behind that remark is that Jesus Christ is the truth. That we’ve got this duty to the truth that we don’t let bad arguments stand even in a good cause. And she was about following the truth fearlessly wherever that led her.
Albert Mohler:
And by the way, I was as confused as her daughter at one point as a college student as I’m trying to come to turn. So I was as a young evangelical Christian, reading about that exchange and a biography of Lewis, I assume then that Anscombe is not a believer. I assume that Anscombe was writing because I will fault the biographer somewhat because it’s as if you know Anscombe is writing simply as an analytic philosopher and basically another AJI or Anthony Flew, and that’s hardly the case.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
No. But it bugs her that he’s glib and sloppy as she sees it, and she wants to say, these arguments don’t work. And Augustine says something like this, he says, “Don’t give bad arguments for the truths of the faith because people will think that those are the arguments you’ve got.”
Albert Mohler:
Right. Yeah. Something about Elizabeth Anscombe that I just want to mention is that her role right now in terms of British public life is largely due to her defense of human dignity and some very prescient work that she did basically on the sanctity of life against the threats of such things as euthanasia and the idea that human life has reached its meaningful end before its physical end.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah, that’s right. The whole second half of her career, arguably her whole career long, my friend at the University of Toronto, a theologian philosopher there, John Berkman is working a lot on this. She’s concerned with the loss of the concept of murder in the late modern world and she thinks about the context of abortion, thinks about it in context of euthanasia, thinks about it in context especially of late modern warfare, that we must preserve the concept of murder and a strict prohibition on the killing of the innocent.
Albert Mohler:
Well, absolutely and that’s one of the reasons why as many have noted, it takes a Christian world to produce a decent murder mystery.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah. I hadn’t thought to link those two things up, but I see it.
Albert Mohler:
And well, it’s been done precisely because for instance, the murder club, which included some of the very people we’ve mentioned here who gave themselves to the literary device, Chesterton involved in this, and so many others, eventually PD James, very much the successor to this, and in some ways is a more popular Iris Murdoch. In that PD James also works in fairly sophisticated, and by the way, more than one of these women used initials so that no one knew exactly what gender they were when they were making their early academic work.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah. It’s a convention in the British Academy, but not always for novelists, so yes.
Albert Mohler:
So to me at least, I would argue that Anscombe and Murdoch have the most lasting, at least recognized significance. So what happens to the four of them in what we might say the afterlife of their philosophical contribution?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah. Midgley becomes actually the most prominent public intellectual of the four of them. She doesn’t start writing until she’s raised her boys, and then she goes back to teaching and then starts writing and brings out the first of her 16 books-
Albert Mohler:
Amazingly.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Starting in her fifties, in the late ’70s. And so they’re famous in different circles. Murdoch, the novelist and Anscombe and Foot together, I think within the academy about equally well known though Anscombe is thought of as the greater and Midgley is the public intellectual, but where do they leave us? Anscombe, Foot and Murdoch between them creates space within the academy to think differently than a thought. They are the ones who open up other vistas who level critiques at the dominant forms of Ayor and post Ayor moral thought.
But none of them really put together an ethics in a way that Midgley does. And so I’m especially admiring of this how this late bloomer or late starter in the set at is the one who thinks about what would this look like if it was more fully spelled out? Anscombe and Foot say things like, well, we should really return to the virtues. We should think more about the virtues. But it’s not like they go Thomas Aquinas and give you this catalog of all the virtues and that’s not Midgley’s approach either, but Midgley goes the furthest to say, let us think about a number of practical questions in life in light of this way of doing ethics.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Okay. I need to ask you this question. So relate these four figures to the question of the existence of God and to the Christian intellectual tradition.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah. That’s a great question. I’ve been thinking about this because you having me on Bishop Baron writing an appreciative note about the book, the book is not apologetic, and yet I’ve been intrigued and pleased to see Christians thinking there’s some affinity between what these women, three of whom are not believers, are doing and how we see the world. It’s a book I would say about how much of a difference it makes, the background pictures that you bring to everything else that you think and everything that you think about. And I think it is as natural as breathing for a Christian to be a moral realist, to think that goodness is objective.
And so whether or not we’re particularly drawn, as I’m drawn myself to this Aristotle, Aquinas virtue and vice way of thinking about ethics, nonetheless, the idea behind the idea that we need to get out of a picture in which this couldn’t be true, in which the world is this pity list, blank valueless place and putting ourselves in a fundamentally different kind of worldview in which we could imagine a moral reality, I think Christians see, oh yes, that moral imagination is something that we recognize and something that we are concerned to defend.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And I do consider myself as a theologian also to have a responsibility as an apologist. But I think that has to come after engaging, honestly, at least it’s honestly as possible, the thought and the structures of thought of the person with whom we’re engaging. I think your book is phenomenally interesting and frankly kind of sets an interpretive grid for what had been a missing piece in the English speaking intellectual tradition.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Thanks so much.
Albert Mohler:
Well, no, I think that that’s something exciting to me is finding… Okay, I knew these people existed. I’ve read, especially Anscombe and some Foot, and it’s just very, very helpful, and even the biographical sections, there’s very helpful. But I make a distinction in this thinking between two different categories that I find lacking sometimes in other apologetic thought. And that is number one, the category of a Christian mind, and then secondly, a mind that still operates within many of the structures of Christian thought, and that’s a distinction, and of course you have those who actually are trying to be outside both of those categories and some quite successfully. And frankly, in this period, in the English speaking world, it was very difficult actually to operate outside the intellectual structures of the inherited Christian faith.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah. And I’m thinking, we’ve mentioned Planica earlier on, I’m thinking of how hard it was for him and Nicholas Walter store for another Christian philosophers coming into the academy at the beginning of their careers. They testified at this when they write memoir that they had to break down these clusters of assumptions, that made the questions they wanted to ask, the things they wanted to say. And that’s a service that’s an important work to do that’s pre-apologetic.
Albert Mohler:
Now, I have never done before in one of these conversations what I’m about to do now because it’s never been an occasion. So your book came out basically in the last year.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
A year ago.
Albert Mohler:
Copyright 2022. Again, the women are up to something, how Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch revolutionized ethics. So then more recently, metaphysical animals, how four women brought philosophy back to life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman. Okay, what’s the difference between these two books? This one came out after yours, I believe.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yeah just.
Albert Mohler:
Did you and the other authors know you were working on the same project?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Eventually we did. I got to know Rachel in 2015, 2016 when I was on one of my stints over in London teaching Houghton University’s honors program and we met for coffee. At the time she had several collaborators, including Claire, were working especially on bringing out anthologies of these women’s writing, but toying with the idea of doing biographical writing. It wasn’t clear at the time that they were already thinking that, but they had me up to a conference in Durham and friends would be too strong we don’t see a lot of one another, but very friendly acquaintances. And then they decided, yeah, we want to write a book on this. So I think each of us was hoping that it wouldn’t be destructive to the other one’s work that each of us was doing this, but each of us knew that we’d independently form the desire to tell this story. But they are different stories. I don’t know if you’ve read Rachel and Claire’s book yet.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, I want you to tell me how you see them as different.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Okay. Theirs has a different set of chronological boundaries. And with that different scope, a different level of detail that I do a childhood to death scope and am asking what’s the implicit philosophical project that emerges out of the work of these women? And Claire and Rachel are especially interested in formative years. They take us just up to 1957, just when Anscombe and Foot are about to start doing-
Albert Mohler:
A lot more detail.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
During the period that they’re famous and it’s hugely richly detailed. It’s so intricate that if you want to take a deep dive into what was their experience like in the ’40s and ’50s that Claire and Rachel are writing about 37 to 57 and writing with a kind of detail that I did not aspire to.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, no, I get that. And I did read their book, and I will say again, by the way, I give them credit for a good title as well. But my thought in the two of these books coming out when they did, and again, I’m always kind of really intellectually curious and hungry when I find a question being asked about a period, about even an individual or a period in an individual’s thought where all of a sudden some formative change has taken place that shapes the Western mind. But it reminded me, I’ve had one of these conversations with Peter Brown at Princeton who was still writing in his 10th decade of life, and he really developed the intellectual field of late medieval history as a period of late medieval history.
And he reshaped the entire intellectual the way intellectual history’s taught. Now you’ve got editors who specialize in editing books on the late medieval era and I have to wonder if something similar will be happening here. I’m just going to predict that I think these two books together and yours first are likely to set off some further discussion, which could also be fruitful.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
I hope so. Yeah. You’re worried when friends are in a kind of professional competition with you or there’s something competitive about your projects. It’s been a relief to them and to me that the books really are distinctive enough to do different kinds of work together and I think it has on the whole, been fruitful for both books to get reviewed together, each of them giving reason to editors to do a review of the other.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, I was particularly intrigued by your book and the way you set out the narrative and by the way, it’s very helpful to me to have kind birth to death covered here and their intellectual impact. I want to ask you one other question, professor Lipscomb so what are you up to now? What are you up to?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
What am I up to?
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. What are you up to?
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Well, always teaching my classes, getting a group of students ready to go off to London with our honors program as they do each spring. But in my scholarship, there’s two things that intrigue me, especially right now. And I don’t know which one of them I’ll pursue more first. First Richard Hare, this POW, who I find a very sympathetic figure in some ways. Very interesting figure. And there’s a pivot in his thought from the first things that he writes while he’s a prisoner of war to the writings for which he becomes known, the writings that set him against these women and then against him.
But I’m interested in what happened there, what were his thoughts at first, and why did he change? He is someone, it seems to me, who falls under the influence of a prevailing intellectual culture of a prevailing intellectual fashion and turns away from what interests me about these women’s work. And I think that’s an interesting story in its own right. But then also I got interested in writing this book about how much philosophy was part of the public conversation in Britain after World War II. The BBC has this highbrow channel, the third program that is broadcasting philosophy talks and philosophy discussions all the time so that it’s much more-
Albert Mohler:
Hourly workers knew who Bertrand Russel was.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Yes. And what was happening there. My working title is Philosophy on the Ayer, and there are rich resources for this. The BBC written archives have transcripts of all of this stuff. I think it could be a fun ensemble cast book thinking about the rise and fall of public philosophy in Britain after the Wars.
Albert Mohler:
Professor, I can understand why students love being in your classes and going with you to study in London. A curious mind and a disciplined mind draws other minds. And I really enjoyed your book, and if you write the one, especially on philosophy, on the Ayer, sign me up for a conversation as soon as it comes out. Thank you for joining me today for Thinking In Public.
Benjamin Lipscomb:
Thanks so much for having me on. It was a pleasure.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Benjamin Lipscomb, for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking In Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmueller.com under the tab, Thinking In Public. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to svts.edu. For information on Boys College, just go to boyscollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking In Public and until next time, keep thinking.