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Dorothy Emmet
(By Lawrence Blum, July 2024. For more on Emmet & The Quartet follow this link)
Dorothy Emmet was an important moral, social, and political philosopher, and metaphysician, whose career spanned and incorporated many currents in 20th century British philosophy. Her father was a vicar of W. Hendred and became a fellow of University College Oxford, moving the family to Oxford. Emmet attended the University, at Lady Margaret Hall, in 1923, where she read “mods and greats”. She attended lectures by H. Joachim, H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, and R.G. Collingwood. Her tutor was A.D. Lindsay, then Master of Balliol, a Christian liberal socialist moral and political philosopher. Unusual for Oxford students, especially women, in the 1926 General Strike (supporting mineworkers in Wales and England), Emmet refused to be a strikebreaker and journeyed to a Welsh mining area where she taught political philosophy (especially Plato) in an education program for miners.
Having studied in the U.S. with the British metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead in the late 20’s, Emmet wrote the first book on Whitehead (Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism ) upon her return. Her next work was The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking in 1945 (written while night fire-watching during the war), pushing back against the harsh critique of metaphysics in the ascending logical positivist movement. She took a post at the University of Manchester in 1938, becoming Head of Department and, in 1946, the second woman to become Professor of Philosophy in the UK substantially building the Philosophy Department there until her retirement in 1966.
In the ‘50’s Emmet joined an anthropology (but also somewhat interdisciplinary) seminar at the University, under the leadership of Max Gluckman, a South African-born founder of the Manchester School of anthropology, and a critic of British colonialism. In 1958, Emmet published Function, Purpose, and Powers, a philosophical critique of functionalism in anthropology and sociology. As Victor Turner, a prominent British anthropologist and member (as a student) of the seminar, wrote in the Preface to a 1972 reissue of that book, Emmet always sought to retain the presence of individual persons, not only social structures, in her approach to anthropology. (“Dorothy Emmet always felt that anthropology was not the study just of social institutions but of institutional man.” p. viii.)
By the ‘50’s Emmet had achieved some stature in British philosophy, giving the annual philosophical lecture to the British Academy (in 1949), and the Stanton lectures in Cambridge in 1950-53. She was president of the Aristotelian Society in ’53-’54. In 1960 Emmet visited Columbia University in the US, studying sociology with Robert Merton, the premier American sociologist of that period. Out of that experience, and also building on her engagement with anthropology, she wrote Rules, Roles, and Relations (1966), on the relation between sociology and ethics. Drawing on Merton’s pioneering work on “roles,” Emmet developed a deeply socially-informed approach to ethics, with role as a morally-structured social position in society carrying distinctive responsibilities and obligations. But she was also influenced by Sartre’s critique of roles (sharing Murdoch and Warnock’s interest in Sartre), and emphasized the individual style that can be expressed by individual occupants of roles.
Emmet collaborated with Alasdair MacIntyre, her former student, on a 1970 co-edited volume, Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis, with writings by philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists on theoretical issues in the social sciences.
Emmet’s 1979 Moral Prism took up the question whether there is a domain of human life “beyond good and evil,” or to which moral considerations do not apply. She examines politics, science, art, and religion as possible such domains. She ends up with the view that morality is inescapable in all these, and other, domains. Morality has “the last word.” But her conception of morality is quite complex, rejecting the view that any available moral theory—deontology, utilitarianism—or single principle of any kind could generate the correct action to perform in every situation. The “prism” metaphor is to say that particular theories or approaches shine a light on an aspect of the moral life, but all are necessary to see the full picture.
Emmet imbibed some of the close argument style of “analytic philosophy,” but retained a much broader philosophic outlook than most analytic philosophers for her entire career. She wrote ten books altogether, four in metaphysics, six in moral, social, political philosophy, and religion. She had a lifelong interest in religion and in the mid-‘60’s retired from Manchester and moved to Cambridge to become part of an intellectual/religious community, the Epiphany Philosophers (EPs). She shared a house—the center of the EP community—with a couple, Margaret Masterman, a philosopher and linguist (and founder of the Cambridge Language Research Unit), and Richard Braithwaite, a philosopher of science and religion. Emmet became the main editor of the EP’s journal Theoria to Theory: An International Journal of Philosophy, Science, and Contemplative Religion, from 1966 until 1981. The EP community, which also held religious retreats, included philosophers, scientists and religious figures, some of whom went on to illustrious careers, such as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002-2012, and the prominent Ghanaian-British-American philosopher K. Anthony Appiah, who worked closely with Emmet on the journal.
Emmet recognized a kinship with Murdoch regarding her interest in religion and their shared refusal to draw a sharp boundary between religion and philosophy, seen by mainstream philosophy in this period as almost part of the definition of “philosophy.” She also appreciated Murdoch’s fiction as a source of moral wisdom. The two had a “philosophical friendship,” in Emmet’s words. Her Role of the Unrealisable (1994) was dedicated to Murdoch (and secondarily to Lindsay). It dealt with ideals that could not be fully realized in practice but, Emmet argued, could productively direct thinking and action in moral, political, religious, and epistemic domains. It is a cross-disciplinary work not easily locatable in standard philosophical subdisciplinary categories. Murdoch admired this work, praising it lavishly in a letter to Emmet.
In the early ‘70’s Emmet was asked to consult on the establishing of a Philosophy Department in the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She had become interested in Africa in part through her contact with Gluckman and Turner, both of whose anthropological work concerned Africa, and to whom she dedicated her last work, the 1998 Outward Forms, Inner Springs. Appiah reports that Emmet encouraged him to think, as a post-graduate student, of doing philosophical work relating to Africa, which he did very much go on to do. This is a further sign of Emmet‘s remarkable breadth of interest, and an early move in the direction of world philosophy and non-Western philosophy which is now, but very much was not then, an increasingly mainstream view within professional philosophy.
Emmet wrote a fascinating memoir, Philosophers and Friends: Reminiscences of Seventy Years in Philosophy (1996), of notable persons mostly in philosophy but also social scientists and religious figures (such as the German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr), whom she encountered in her long career. The work provides an unusual take on 20th century British philosophy, spanning many different currents and not privileging the analytic or linguistic ones. It provides an important resource for thinking about the Quartet and how to rethink the various strands of 20th century British philosophy.
Emmet wrote two works in metaphysics in her last decades—The Effectiveness of Causes (1986), The Passage of Nature (1992)—building on her work on Whitehead in the ‘30’s. Her final collection, Outward Forms, Inner Springs: A Study in Social and Religious Philosophy (1998), captures her unusual bringing together of moral and social philosophy, religion and social science, that characterized her career.
Emmet became a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College (Cambridge) in 1966, was elected an honorary fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and received honorary degrees from the University of Glasgow (1974), University of Leicester (1976), and the Open University (1997).
- Larwrence Blum is leading a project on Emmet & The Quartet. More information here.
Mary Warnock
(By Ana Barandalla, June 2024)
Mary Warnock was born Helen Mary Wilson on 14 April 1924 in Winchester, in the South East of England. She became Warnock when she married Geoffrey Warnock in 1949. Warnock was educated at St Swithun’s, a High-Church school near her home (Memoir 8-9), and at Prior’s Field, a school in Surrey founded by the Huxley family (Memoir 12).
In 1942, Warnock arrived at Lady Margaret Hall to read Honour Moderations and Literae Humaniores, or ‘Mods and Greats’, a mixture of ancient history and philosophy (Memoir 13).
Warnock knew Foot, Murdoch, and Anscombe severally and remained a lifelong admirer of the women’s philosophical acumen. She would often single Foot out for her pioneering efforts to re-establish a connection between moral theory and actual moral life; Murdoch for introducing Sartre and existentialism to Anglophone philosophy; and she regarded Anscombe as a ‘truly original philosopher’ (Women Philosophers 203-4), who came into her own and showed her calibre after she stepped out of her master’s – Wittgenstein – shadow, which was, of course, forced by his untimely death (Memoir 74).
In 1949 Warnock started a lectureship at St Hugh’s College (Memoir 16). She left in 1966, having come to the view that she was ‘not much good at ’ (Memoir 23).
(Note: page references within the following book descriptions refer to the specific books under consideration.)
During her time in academia Warnock wrote a number of survey books. The first, Ethics Since 1900, with OUP came out in 1960, with a revised Second Edition in 1966, and various reprints. In it, Warnock charts the development of what we would now call metaethics during the first six decades of the century. Warnock’s own reflections on the current state of moral philosophy reveal where she concurred with the Quartet, and where she parted from it. She was certain that forgoing the ambitions of metaphysicians counted as progress – she was a proud daughter of the burgeoning ordinary language philosophy, with the ontological austerity it entailed. In this respect, then, she was not in alignment with the view that we are ‘metaphysical animals’. But she also thought that the austerity approach had been employed with excessive zeal, producing an ethical discourse too distant from how ethical lives are actually lived. This was compounded by the belief that only the form of morality was the business of philosophy, not its content, for the content was a matter of value and it was deemed that matters of value are ultimately idiosyncratic. She ends with the hope that a salutary change is in the offing – a moral discourse that is concerned what what is actually good and bad, and that speaks to moral agents – with Philippa Foot’s challenge to the separation between fact and value leading the way (145-7).
The Philosophy of Sartre (Hutchinson University Press, 1963). The object of this little book is to introduce the reader to the whole of Sartre’s philosophical work to date (9) – from his earlier protracted conversation with Descartes, to his Marxist turn (11-2) – and to do so whilst rendering his views clear (12).
Existentialist Ethics (MacMillan 1967). Although Warnock acknowledges that within existentialism no difference is descried between ethics and the rest of philosophy, she also believes that an ethical outlook is implicit in existentialism, and in this little book, she aims to bring it to light. The bulk of the book is focused on Sartre, but it also features brief introductions to Kierkegaard and to Heidegger.
Existentialism (Oxford Paperbacks, 1970, Revised Edition 1996). Here Warnock traces the origins, development, and scope of existentialism. She locates its origin in the marriage of Husserl’s phenomenology on the one hand, and Kierkegaard’s and Nietzsche’s ethics on the other (3). She takes us through Heidegger’s nascent existentialism ensuing from his bolstering of Kant’s conception of the individual. We’re introduced to Merleau-Ponte and his account of the relation between consciousness and the world (73). Sartre, once again, takes the lion’s share of attention. Warnock shows us how he took existentialism to its apex – with his conception of the individual as absolute sovereign – and then to its collapse (71) into Marxism, with the individual now assimilated into the group (131).
Sartre: A Collection of Critical Essays (Anchor Books 1971). In this collection Warnock seeks to touch on the whole spectrum of Sartre’s thought: his philosophy and the debt of the same to German existentialism; his work as dramatist and as critic; and his diversion into sociology via his Marxism. As such, the essays that comprise it – a mixture of reprints and originals – are not all of them philosophical, but include literary and sociological discussions.
The preceding body of work does not build a concerted picture of Warnock’s philosophical outlook, as it is mostly expository of other people’s ideas. It is in Imagination (Faber 1976) that Warnock finally puts her own views forth. She looks at the concept of the imagination as employed by various figures, both historical (Hume, Kant, Schelling, Coleridge, Wordsworth) and contemporary (Sartre, Wittgenstein), to identify common threads that might point to the ontology of the phenomenon (9). She concludes that the picture arising is one in which the imagination is a creative power at work in all our perceptions of the world. It is the power that interprets things as we perceive them (196) and ascribes meaning to them (207). The imagination is ‘quite literally what gives value to our world’ (209). This power, she continues, combines our faculties of the intellect and of emotion. And so, Warnock concludes, our educational endeavours ought to cultivate the emotions no less than the intellect (9, 202).
Long after Warnock had left academia she edited Women Philosophers (J. M. Dent 1996), a collection of reprinted articles and extracts from seventeen figures spanning a period from the 17th Century to the present. The purpose of the book is to showcase examples of women’s writings in the traditional fields of philosophy: moral philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, logic – and existentialism also makes the cut.
Lest this project should be misidentified, it must be made plain that it is not an undertaking fuelled by feminist concerns to give recognition to unjustly overlooked thinkers: Warnock forthrightly avers that not many women philosophers have had their work unjustly overlooked (xxxvi-xxxvii). As for feminist philosophy itself and why it is not represented in the collection, Warnock is of the view that the very notion is an oxymoron: philosophy ‘must be gender-indifferent’ (xxxiv), so works pertaining to ‘“women’s” issues’ (xxxiv) are automatically disqualified from the discipline.
Outside academia, Warnock led a life of public service, heading numerous government enquiries, and, in 1985, being elected to the House of Lords, thus becoming Baroness Warnock. She also became a well-known public intellectual, and her appearances in public media and cultural events continued into her nineties.
Warnock died on 20 March 2019, aged ninety-four.
Sources
Mac Cumhail, Clare & Wiseman, Rachael (2022) Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life, Penguin.
Warnock, Mary (1960, 1966) Ethics Since 1900, Oxford University Press.
Warnock, Mary (1963)The Philosophy of Sartre, Hutchinson University Press.
Warnock, Mary (1967) Existentialist Ethics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, New York: Springer.
Warnock, Mary (1970) Existentialism, Oxford Paperbacks.
Warnock, Mary ed. (1971) Sartre: A Collection of Critical Essays, Anchor Books.
Warnock, Mary (1976) Imagination, Faber.
Warnock, Mary ed. (1996)Women Philosophers, London, J. M. Dent.
Warnock, Mary (2000) A Memoir: People and Places, Duckworth.
Wilson, Duncan (2023, April 13). Warnock , (Helen) Mary, Baroness Warnock (1924–2019), philosopher, headmistress, and public servant. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 20 Apr. 2024, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-90000380946.
Julius Kovesi
(By Alan Tapper, May 2024)
Writing in 2004, Philippa Foot described Julius Kovesi as one of the “members of a small band of guerrillas fighting the prevailing orthodoxy of anti-naturalist emotivism and prescriptivism in ethics, and challenging the Humean doctrine of the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’”. This is good-enough grounds for thinking of Kovesi in connection with the Quartet. Kovesi was about 10 years younger than the Quartet members. He was a friend of Foot and Midgley. But he remains little known and so, readers might ask, who was Julius Kovesi?
Kovesi was an Australian moral philosopher and intellectual historian. He was born in Budapest in 1930 and grew up in north-western Hungary, where his father managed a brickworks. The mid-twentieth century brought war, invasion, and occupation first by German troops and then by the Russians. After the War, Kovesi was a student at Budapest University, where he attended the philosophy lectures of George Lukács. As communist rule became increasingly oppressive, he and his brother decided to escape while it was still possible, only to be caught at the Austrian border. Kovesi, even then ideologically quick on his feet, told the guards that he and his brother were not rejecting communism, they were only foolish young bourgeois students who wanted to see Paris before the final collapse of capitalism. They were released after a beating, but only on condition that they reported on fellow-students who might also be planning to escape. Within days they again headed for the border, and this time succeeded in crossing it.
In 1956, six years after migrating with his family to Perth, Western Australia, Kovesi had mastered English, completed a first class honours degree in philosophy, and taken up Australian citizenship. He was awarded a scholarship for postgraduate study at Balliol College. He was at Oxford in 1956-58, a time when the Quartet –– Foot, Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe –– was flourishing. His tutor was R.M. Hare, but the philosopher who had the greatest influence on him was his thesis supervisor, J.L. Austin. Just before his final exams at Oxford, Austin gave him a note reading: “Be relevant. Read and answer the question.” It was a note he framed and kept on his desk for the rest of his career.
After Oxford, Kovesi spent a year at Edinburgh University, followed by three years at the University of New England, before returning to the University of Western Australia in 1962. He remained on the staff there for the rest of his life, where he taught until a week before his death, aged 58, in 1989.
Kovesi’s only book, Moral Notions, was published in 1967. It was highly praised in a 1969 Critical Notice in Mind by Bernard Mayo, who described it “a lightning campaign of a mere 40,000 words” which is “somewhat intoxicating”, and which “decisively and permanently alters the balance of power” in the debate about the relationship between facts and values. The book presents “a general theory of concept-formation, meaning, and rules of usage”, which is then used “to solve or dissolve an impressive list of standard problems in moral philosophy”. “Time and again a startling paradox brings us to a halt, and we want a recapitulation of the steps in the argument that got us there. Nearly always we are driven back to realise that a favourite preconception has been subtly charmed away.” Mayo saw the book as carrying forward the work of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot.
Moral Notions is in part a reply to Hare’s 1952 The Language of Morals, but it is much more than that. It shows a deep knowledge of the history of moral philosophy, most obviously of Plato, Aristotle, Hume and G.E. Moore. Foot herself observed that Moral Notions is “like no other book of moral philosophy” and is “radically different from anything else on the scene, either then or now”. Alasdair MacIntyre has described it as making “a remarkable contribution both to the philosophy of language and to moral philosophy”. Bernard Harrison has said that he regards Moral Notions as the best book on moral philosophy written since the War, and that “I have constantly recommended , whenever I have had the chance, to dozens of people over the succeeding thirty years, and used it in teaching a lot before I retired”.
Kovesi also published four later papers on moral philosophy: “Valuing and Evaluating”, Jowett Papers 1968-69, (1970), 53–64; “Against the Ritual of ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’“, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, III (1978), 5–16; “Descriptions and Reasons”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1979–80), 101–113; and “Principia Ethica Re-examined: The Ethics of a Proto-Logical Atomism”, Philosophy, 59 (1984), 157–170. These are collected in Julius Kovesi, Values and Evaluations: Essays on Ethics and Ideology (Peter Lang, 1998).
Moral Notions was republished as Moral Notions, with Three Papers on Plato, edited by R.E. Ewin and Alan Tapper (Cybereditions, 2004), with a Foreword by Philippa Foot. Foot commented that “It is sad that we have a second chance to appreciate this remarkable book only after Kovesi’s death, and I myself much regret that I cannot discuss it with him”.
A collection of reflections on Kovesi’s work, Meaning and Morality: Essays on the Philosophy of Julius Kovesi (Brill), was published in 2012, with contributions by (amongst others) Harrison, R.E. Ewin, Anthony Kenny, Peter A. French and Jean Bethke Elshtain. French remarks that Moral Notions “struck me in the same way it did many other philosophers at that time who were interested in understanding our moral vocabulary: it was unorthodox and yet persuasive in a most disarming and straightforward way”. In her essay, Elshtain comments that “Contrary to the presuppositions of the political science in which I was trained, description and evaluation are not entirely separate activities. We do not layer evaluations onto a neutral description; rather, moral evaluation is embedded in our descriptions. How we describe is itself often a moral act. This is a case made eloquently in a book that seems to have disappeared from view, Julius Kovesi’s Moral Notions”. Reviewing Meaning and Morality, Roger A. Shiner speaks of “Kovesi’s originality and his importance as a contributor to moral philosophy, at least its meta-ethical aspect” and of his “character as a thoughtful and humane practitioner of the moral life”.
Kovesi was also a scholar of Marx and Marxism; his special interest was in the thought of Moses Hess, a Jewish Left Hegelian who introduced Engels to communism. Kovesi was a thinker with broad interests, a very quick wit and an incisive intelligence, though not well-known except to a few, including Foot and Midgley.
The 2004 version of Moral Notions is freely available on PhilPapers.