A delightful group portrait of four college friends-Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley-who formed a new philosophical tradition starting with the ideas, fears, and hopes of women while Oxford’s men were away at war

The history of European philosophy is usually formed from the ideas, visions and hopes of men, many of whom lived monastic lives apart from women and children. In the mid-twentieth century, as students at Oxford, Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch launched an alternative.

In the 1930’s, while the men of their class went to war, these four women dared to question the abstraction of the modern male philosophical tradition, returning instead to questions of virtue and human nature. They did their philosophical work among diapers and babies, in living rooms and teashops, and in a landscape of bombed out buildings, emergency hospitals, and displaced people. Each woman concluded that human life is not a pursuit for an isolated individual, but for a group.

Metaphysical Animals is a retelling of modern philosophy that places four women at the center. It is a story of love and war and friendship that offers a new answer to the fundamental question: what do we live for?