2. In Parenthesis and Women in Philosophy

(In Parenthesis) presents itself as first and foremost a historical project. It endeavours to rewrite the history of analytical philosophy to include Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch as a school with its own method.Footnote ⁸ Yet, by studying the lives and works of these four philosophers Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman are also looking for insight into ‘barriers to inclusion’ and intend ‘to discover unknown factors and ultimately new strategies for gender activism within philosophy’.Footnote ⁹

(In Parenthesis) is then also a feminist project, if by feminism we mean any concerted effort to create equality between the genders. Of course, there are many feminisms, if only because it is not easy to decide what equality means. (To give a simple example with nevertheless significant consequences: to provide an equal number of toilets for men and women leaves women with a much longer waiting time than men.Footnote ¹⁰) Yet, if (In Parenthesis) is a feminist project, it is remarkable how little it uses the word ‘feminism’. It was not used in any of the descriptions of the 2018–2019 lectures series of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (and that includes mine). It is rarely used in its publications.

On the website of (In Parenthesis), most hits for feminism are found in the wonderful lecture by Professor Pamela Sue Anderson, entitled ‘Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability’.Footnote ¹¹ I should say the late Professor Anderson, who could tell us much about barriers against inclusivity and strategies for inclusion and who was a great inspiration and support for many young philosophers. To find the word feminism in the writing of Wiseman and Mac Cumhaill I had to go to the latest edition of The Iris Murdoch Review, where they explain their strategy as follows:

This quotation gives insight into (In Parenthesis)’s understanding of feminism. Firstly, it emphasises the importance of recognition as a serious interlocutor and secondly, it omits the the word ‘philosophical’ from its last line. Rewriting history has social and political importance, but not philosophical? I shall come back to both these points.

Even though the project is only a few years old, it has already provided a number of explanations for these four women's remarkable achievements. The first came in the exchange that was at the start of the project. In his column in The Guardian in November 2013 Jonathan Wolff had been musing about the exclusive nature of philosophy. He revisits his copy of Warnock's memoirs and asks: ‘What was it that produced such a superb cohort of female philosophers, unmatched, I think, by anything we have seen since?’Footnote ¹³

Midgley replied two days later: ‘As a survivor from the wartime group, I can only say: sorry, but the reason was indeed that there were fewer men about then’. Men are not the problem as such, but a certain style of doing philosophy is, as Midgley, tongue in cheek, suggests:

An editor gave Midgley's reply the title ‘The Golden Age of Female Philosophy’. This title is troubling for different reasons. Firstly, as Midgley points out in one of the interviews by (In Parenthesis): ‘Four of us don't make a Golden Age’.Footnote ¹⁵ Secondly, highlighting these women can make others even more invisible. Wolff's suggestion that he has not seen anything like this since seems to reinforce the difficulty that women and diverse people can face in being recognised as ‘knowers’, a difficulty mentioned by him in the same column and discussed at length by Anderson.Footnote ¹⁶

This column and its responses, together with the memoirs by Mary Warnock (People and Places, 2000) and Midgley (The Owl of Minerva, 2005) have added to this first exchange to create an amalgam of explanations. Midgley points out that it mattered that there were fewer men around because of the war. Classes were smaller and the discussions less combative. This gave the women the space and time to find their voice. The women were also encouraged by their teacher, Donald MacKinnon. They were all middle class. They got together to discuss their shared despair at the moral philosophy of their time. (As Midgley puts it: ‘We got quite indignant about that!’Footnote ¹⁷)

Some of these insights return in the website's enthusiastic suggestion to ‘host a cocoa party’ or start a reading group. One could think of others: a reevaluation of teaching at university, for instance, which – at least in Britain – has lost its prestige to research. A teacher like MacKinnon might not have been able to find or retain a position at a UK institution today.Footnote ¹⁸ The excellent report ‘Women in Philosophy’ by Jennifer Saul and Helen Beebee for SWIP/BPA (2011) should also be mentioned here and its recommendations for challenging implicit bias and stereotype threat and the inclusion of women in one's syllabi and conferences.Footnote ¹⁹

Yet, what I find missing, is a more direct challenge to philosophy's method, goals or to the questions it asks. Thus, in the next section, I intend to heed to Dotson's call for ‘alternative methods of philosophical investigation’.Footnote ²⁰ I do so by by asking ‘what is it like to be a woman in philosophy?’ when it comes to Murdoch. This question is of course a direct reference to the website ‘What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?’.Footnote ²¹ It asks about personal experience and partakes in feminist practice which takes personal experience seriously, that is telling stories and listening to voices that would otherwise go unheard. This practice is an important tool in challenging power relations. Yet, as Linda Martín Alcoff explains, women philosophers have been surprisingly reluctant to share their experiences.Footnote ²²

The reluctance to take experience seriously is also surprising when considering that in the field of philosophy there is an additional reason to take experience seriously. This is Socrates’ famous phrase ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ (Apology 38a). I mention this here for two reasons. First, all philosophy which is not a direct reflection on experience is a departure from this famous dictum. Secondly, for the last ten years or so, I have been inspired to think of alternative methods for doing philosophy as a participant and facilitator of Socratic dialogues in the Nelson-Heckmann-Specht tradition. Dialogues in this tradition are best described as philosophical investigations of experience undertaken together.Footnote ²³ They offer a way of doing philosophy which is very different from much of what I have encountered in academic settings, because of the central role of experience and because the dialogue is a shared undertaking. Participants try to understand each other and come to a consensus (if possible). These dialogues allow participants to experience that combative forms of arguing are not necessarily the best means to wisdom. They can be detrimental to the philosophical investigation, especially but not exclusively when one discusses experience and thus makes oneself vulnerable.Footnote ²⁴

Before I turn to the next section, however, a brief reflection on the question of what it is to be a woman in philosophy. This may seem a trivial or elite pursuit, given the silencing of women in other situations that ask more urgently for voices to be heard. While this objection is not without its merit, it is also true that the exclusive nature of the discipline has resulted in an excluding understanding of who is and who is not capable of thought, which has had its repercussions beyond the discipline.Footnote ²⁵

More importantly, the objection implies that philosophy is a luxury and I do not think it should be seen as such. I am for that reason concerned about the number of philosophy departments that are in the process of closing or have closed at universities around the country. In the last few years, London alone has seen the closure of philosophy departments at London Metropolitan, Middlesex University, Greenwich University, Heythrop College (which has closed altogether) and St. Mary's University. This means that in London the opportunities for students with lower grades to study philosophy are dwindling fast. In the current British education system, students with lower grades are not necessarily academically less capable. They are often from a disadvantaged economic background. Philosophy thus runs the risk of becoming an elite subject again.

It is of interest to note some of the similarities in the closure of these programmes here. One is the fact that these universities combined European and analytical approaches to philosophy, were often near the top in terms of student satisfaction and offered modules that allow students to take philosophy outside the university. (For instance, Philosophy with Children at Greenwich University and Heythrop College, Socratic dialogue at St. Mary's University). Most significant is that the one degree that was saved was the MA in European Philosophy, which moved from Middlesex to Kingston. The deciding factor was the REF.

Here one cannot but be reminded of Mary Midgley's comments on the closure of philosophy in Newcastle in the 1980s. She writes in her latest work, What is philosophy for?:

The closure of those five philosophy departments confirms the judgment of research as the highest value. We are in a situation that is not that different from the one Mary Midgley describes. And yet, what if, philosophy is not a luxury, but, as Midgley would have it, a need for everyone?Footnote ²⁷

3. What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?

What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? When asked in interviews, Murdoch seemed reluctant to acknowledge any difference between being a man and being a woman in philosophy. Most famously, when asked in an interview with Sheila Hale in 1976 whether there was a contemporary woman she admired, she expressed her regard for Simone de Beauvoir, but also added: ‘… the subject bores me in a way. …I have never felt picked out in an intellectual sense because I am a woman; these distinctions are not made at Oxford’.Footnote ²⁸ Murdoch's words here are an obvious echo of the famous opening lines of De Beauvoir's The Second Sex (‘For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women’.Footnote ²⁹) Yet, unlike De Beauvoir, Murdoch avoids the subject or even warns against pursuing it.Footnote ³⁰ What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? It is like being a man in philosophy.

These are curious claims, especially given the current debates about (the lack of) women in philosophy, which have not bypassed Oxford.Footnote ³¹ In March 2018 its Faculty of Philosophy decided to ‘feminise’ its reading lists and to introduce the target of 40% female authors. This decision was reported on various news sites, but – as far as I have been able to determine – not on the website of Oxford University. On the news sites, the comments were largely critical. The following gives a good flavour:

This comment is based on a number of suppositions. It assumes that it is only worthwhile to read the best writers and that it is clear who is better and who is worse and that this is not a matter of taste or tradition. Most importantly, it assumes that the reading lists now contain ‘the best writers’ and that some will need to go.

This last suggestion is in a way confirmed by the then chair of the philosophy faculty, Edward Harcourt, when he explains the rationale for this change: ‘partly just because it's interesting, and partly to raise the profile and status of feminist philosophy at Oxford’.Footnote ³³ There is no mention that there was anything wrong with the existing lists. It is, of course, interesting to include 40% women philosophers, as it interesting to, for instance, include one thinker from every century or to reintroduce some thinkers from the Medieval period, which seem to have disappeared from most departments. Yet, it would have been more honest and insightful to admit that any reading list can be improved and that philosophy is not as neutral as it is too often assumed to be.Footnote ³⁴ It is significant that only the student newspaper invited experts in feminist philosophy to respond to the initiative. Both professors Mari Mikkola (Oxford) and Jennifer Saul (Sheffield) argue against an understanding of philosophy as ‘value-free’ or about ‘timeless truths’.Footnote ³⁵ This raises the question of what these values are, or whose.

I discuss this example here, because some of these assumptions seem to underlie Murdoch's replies in interviews. Most importantly, Murdoch assumes philosophy is gender neutral. This is a curious suggestion, given that in her writing Murdoch is keenly aware of ‘would-be neutral philosophers [who] merely take sides surreptitiously’.Footnote ³⁶ That she does not extend this insight to gender could suggest a more general reluctance to consider gender in philosophy. It should also be noted that Murdoch's comments there are not the full story. Firstly, Murdoch's words in interviews are not a comprehensive account of her position. Murdoch gave more than 175 interviews between 1955 and 1996. These are at times illuminating and at other times baffling. Murdoch sometimes provides wonderful insight into her work and her life and at other times her words seem at odds with her writing practice.Footnote ³⁷

Secondly and more importantly, Murdoch was well aware of gender distinctions and discrimination. From Peter Conradi's bibliography we learn that on arrival in Oxford Murdoch was warned by the Dean of Somerville that ‘women are still very much on probation in this University’.Footnote ³⁸ Conradi also notes that she perceived herself ‘as a mixture of the revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg, the philosopher Susan Stebbing and the feminist writer Simone De Beauvoir,’ and was advised by MacKinnon never to repeat that to anyone.Footnote ³⁹ The most immediate example comes from an interview with Sir Harold Hobson in 1962, which took place in the Ladies section of the Union Club. In this interview Murdoch points out the sexism and prejudice of the interviewer to which he subjects her in the actual conservation. He first suggests it is all a joke, but when pressed he is not so sure. (I used this example in an earlier article and am surprised how little it has been noted and discussed.Footnote ⁴⁰)

It is clear that Murdoch experienced sexism, which should not come as a surprise. She was able to recognise and name it as such, but she did not discuss, let alone write about, her experience of being a woman and a philosopher. Perhaps MacKinnon's advice stopped her from ever bringing it up again. There is, of course, no obligation to speak of one's experience, including one's experience of being a woman. The subject is ‘boring’ and ‘irritating’. This was true in 1948, it was true in 1962 and, I would argue, is still true today. Any space that promises to take us out of that messiness has to be welcomed and philosophy still promises to be such a space.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet, it does not follow that Murdoch was not affected by being a woman. This is poignantly obvious when considering the first years after her death.

In the early 2000s Murdoch, philosopher and novelist, was even more famous for a third reason: for suffering from Alzheimer's disease at the end of her life and for having a lot of sex with different people when she was young. In those years people would mention the film first when I told them I was working on Iris Murdoch. This film, Iris (2001), is a moving portrait of someone who cares about a spouse with Alzheimer. Yet, even though there is ample talk about Murdoch's work and how wonderful it is, the film contains hardly any of her words or ideas. I counted one slightly adopted line from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and one quotation from the letter by Paul to the Philippians, with which Murdoch ends Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.Footnote ⁴² What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? Is it to be remembered for someone other than your thoughts? Not to be given your own voice?

In addition to the difficulties noted above, Murdoch's oeuvre adds more complication. Murdoch was and probably is better known as a novelist. This creates the difficulty of her oeuvre. How do the two genres relate? Can we read the one without the other? Can we even make a distinction between the two? It may be possible that the novels allowed Murdoch a financial and intellectual independence, yet the growing distance to academic philosophy seems also to have troubled her. In interviews Murdoch was reluctant to call herself a philosopher.Footnote ⁴³ She shares this reluctance with two other great thinkers from the twentieth century, De Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, whose work – like Murdoch's – is not easy to pigeonhole.Footnote ⁴⁴

What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? It is to be annoyed with that question, it is be deeply aware of gender distinctions and bored by it, it is to have your first name as the title of a film that has only one sentence from your own writing in it and it is to confuse future scholars with the nature of your oeuvre. In short, there is no easy answer to the question, but ignoring it may result in not seeing how some gender stereotypes have moved us away from Murdoch's work or to overlook its attempt at inclusivity. I discuss this last aspect in the next section.

4. Common sense - sensus communis

Murdoch may have denied the existence of gender distinctions in Oxford, but – like other members of the quartet – she was aware of the divergence between her philosophical thinking and that encountered in Oxford. In this section I argue that her work offers an alternative philosophical method, which I characterise as common sense, or sensus communis. I thus engage again more directly with the project of (In Parenthesis), in particular their characterisation of the Quartet's attitude as ‘uncommon sense realism’.

In almost all her writing Murdoch is concerned with not just arguments, but also the form which arguments take or should take.Footnote ⁴⁵ The three essays in The Sovereignty of Good provide insightful examples. In the first, ‘The Idea of Perfection’, Murdoch proclaims that ‘[t]here is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts.’Footnote ⁴⁶ She announces that she will attempt a ‘movement of return’. The second essay, ‘On “God” and “Good”’ begins with the provoking sentence: ‘To do philosophy is to explore one's own temperament, and yet at the same time to attempt to discover the truth’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The third essay, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, takes issue with the disregard for metaphors held ‘by many contemporary thinkers’.Footnote ⁴⁸

I am in particular interested in the return to simple and obvious facts, for this is a returning trope especially in Murdoch's earlier writing. Murdoch often distances herself from the dominant philosophical argumentation and takes the position of an outsider, siding with the ordinary, the ‘simple’ and ‘obvious’, with ‘us,’ ‘when we are not philosophising’Footnote ⁴⁹. She also introduces outsiders to the philosophical debate: the virtuous peasants,‘some quiet unpretentious worker, a schoolteacher, or a mother, or better still an aunt.’Footnote ⁵⁰ She lets an argument be interrupted by ‘people [who] may begin to protest and cry out and say that something has been taken from them.’Footnote ⁵¹

This trope of the virtuous peasant has been criticised for being literary fiction more than an actual person and Murdoch has been accused of living in an ivory tower.Footnote ⁵² Murdoch seems aware of this criticism when she exclaims in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: ‘I have known such aunts’.Footnote ⁵³ While the criticism is not without foundation, I don't think it is sufficient reason to dismiss these references. The voices are disruptive to Murdoch's argument. Murdoch heeds to voices outside the academic debate, even when they are more like a cry and less like a fully fledged argument. These voices are thus proof of Murdoch's attempt to make philosophy more inclusive, even if it is not as inclusive as her critics might like.

This concern with the form of argument does not necessarily place Murdoch outside the tradition of philosophy. On the contrary, it can be understood in a long tradition of philosophers who marked a clear break with their predecessors (such as, for instance, René Descartes or A.J. Ayer). Yet, to do so would be to miss an opportunity to rethink the history and practices of philosophy. Alternative placing is suggested by the work of different feminist thinkers and most succinctly presented in the musings that conclude the first chapter of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The narrator has talked of a visit to Oxbridge, where her thought is first interrupted when she is stopped from walking on the grass and next when she is barred from entering the library. She has had a copious lunch at a men's college and a more frugal dinner at a women's college and then on her way back to her room at the end of the day: ‘I pondered … what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind; … I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Woolf cautions that being an outsider is not an entirely undesirable condition, even if it is likely to be short on money. She thus makes us reflect on any attempt to move the outsider inside.

In their ‘Women in the History of Philosophy’ lecture at the University of Sheffield in 2017, Wiseman and Mac Cumhaill characterise the four women's stance as ‘uncommon sense realism’. They explain this term as follows: ‘The realistic spirit described involves a strong commitment to ‘common sense’, but not in the manner of linguistic philosophers like Hare and ‘ordinary language’ philosophers like Austin.’ ‘Uncommon sense’ then, because of common sense's possible association with Hare and Austin. ‘Uncommon sense’ too, because of the realism of these women, taking a realistic attitude is ‘an uncommon achievement.’Footnote ⁵⁵

I have wondered whether the term ‘uncommon sense’ has been inspired by the quotation at the start of my article. The quotation comes from Mary Warnock's memoirs and I have used it in an earlier text. Warnock reflects here on the exceptional generation who were her seniors by only a few years:

In an earlier article I attributed probably more significance to these lines than Warnock allows for. I related the quotation to the prominent trope of the outsider in Murdoch's writing and I argued that it was the literary tradition of Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Mrs Gaskill that allowed Murdoch to take her position of an outsider in academic philosophy.Footnote ⁵⁷

I agree that ‘common sense’ is a difficult term for the reasons Wiseman and Mac Cumhaill mention and perhaps even more so because in our everyday conversations it has the connotation of exclusion. People are admonished for not showing any common sense rather than appraised for showing any. One is told off for having no common sense when cutting oneself, rather than praised for exhibiting plenty of common sense when preparing a meal without the need for plasters. Yet, despite these concerns, I would want to plead for the use of the term ‘common sense’ – or perhaps the Latin sensus communis – to understand the achievements of these women and in particular of Murdoch. Sensus communis may challenge philosophical practice in a way that I am still exploring. What follows is a first indication of its promise.

Common sense has – as far as I know - two distinct histories in philosophy. The traditions are probably not as separate as I present them here, but I have found no cross reference. The one history is that of – roughly – Thomas Reid, G.E. Moore and others, who claim the certainty of self-evident truths. The assumption is that such truths are ‘no sooner understood than they are believed’.Footnote ⁵⁸ They form the foundation of philosophical reflection. The other tradition is that of Immanuel Kant and more recently, and for this article more importantly, Hannah Arendt. Common sense is here sensus communis.Footnote ⁵⁹ Arendt understands this as the sixth sense and as a sense that we share. While historically Murdoch is associated more with Moore than Arendt, I shall use Arendt's rather than Moore's understanding here.Footnote ⁶⁰

Arendt understands common sense as a sense of what is in common. Common sense, she writes, ‘…assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves’.Footnote ⁶¹ I know that the coffee in my cup is real, because my different senses confirm this (it looks like coffee, it smells like coffee, it tastes like coffee and as much as that is possible it feels and sounds like coffee). I also know it is real because it is common to myself and others (the moment of drinking coffee is often a social event at a particular time of the day. Or to put it differently, no one is behaving as if there is no cup on the table or as if I am about to drink poison, etc.). In The Human Condition Arendt writes: ‘the presence of others, who see and hear what we see and hear assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves.’Footnote ⁶²

Common sense reassures us of reality. The notion thus understood reminds of the experiences of women and diverse people in philosophy, who feel excluded and also disconnected when for instance the misogyny of a thinker is treated as a mere joke. In Arendt's work common sense plays an important part in her understanding of totalitarianism. Common sense is vulnerable and can leave us. We see innocent people being led away and yet we can't believe our eyes, especially when no one else seem to acknowledge the awful reality.

If common sense is thus understood, the question remains whether common sense is taken as either a priori or a posteriori. Do we hold whatever it is as common sense by virtue of our humanity or whether it is acquired during our lives and perhaps specific to the community we are part of? Both these understandings can lead to exclusivity, either when one is denied one's humanity or excluded from a community.Footnote ⁶³ A way out of this problem is suggested by Marieke Borren, who emphasises the phenomenological nature of Arendt's writing: ‘As a phenomenologist, [Arendt] rejects the idea of human nature altogether and instead adopts the perspective of human conditions, which may or may not be realized, depending on other conditions and circumstances’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Common sense or sensus communis is then something to be valued. The remedy to any frightening loss of common sense, and thus of reality, is, for Arendt, to talk about what we share with friends and by talking make them more common.Footnote ⁶⁵ This conversation does not mean all will agree, but only that something will become more common to all, that friendships are made stronger as well as our sense of reality. It seems to me that this characterises Murdoch's dialogical philosophy as well as the conversations Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch had. Philosophy – as most intellectual endeavours – can be and has been an alienating activity. That Murdoch was able to redeem some of the outsiders perspectives for philosophy may well be thanks to these conversations.

If this understanding of philosophy as not abandoning common sense or sensus communis may not seem all that unusual, I would be glad. Of course, this kind of conversation is not alien to history of philosophy or to current philosophical practice. Yet, it may surprise those people who understand philosophy as a rigid pursuit of truth, as combat between adversaries, which may in its endeavour silence a diversity of voices.Footnote ⁶⁶ What I hope to have shown is that this silence is not just to the detriment of those voices, but also to the philosophy developed. Why else would we be celebrating the voices of the wartime quartet, if not for their profound contributions?

5. Coda

What is it like to be a woman in philosophy? I hope to have shown that there is not a simple answer to this question, not in general and not in the case of Murdoch. In one interview Murdoch claimed that in Oxford there was no difference: to be a woman in philosophy is to be a man in philosophy. Yet, there is also ample evidence that she was keenly aware of gender discrimination and that she understood philosophy as not value free. Gender also affected her posthumous image for a while, when she was portrayed for the mind she lost rather than for the novels and works of philosophy that she wrote.

Being a woman in philosophy runs the risk of not being taken seriously as an interlocutor. When those who divert from the dominant discourse are asked once too often whether what they are doing is philosophy, it should not surprise that some of them decide to leave the profession. It is not obvious whose loss is greater, whether it is, as Woolf mused, better to be locked in or locked out, whether, as Dotson puts it, they have failed in philosophy or philosophy has failed them.

Philosophy is slowly becoming a more inclusive discipline, thanks to a growing number of proposals and recommendations. I have argued that to become truly inclusive philosophy needs to rethink its methods, goals and the questions it asks. Dotson is right to argue that philosophy needs a plurality of methods. Inspired by Murdoch and the wartime quartet I have characterised one alternative as ‘not abandoning common sense’. This kind of philosophy is a shared investigation of experience. As a shared investigation it is markedly different from the adversarial method and its focus of experience allows us to confirm reality and recognise diversity.

There are good reasons for making philosophy more inclusive. Philosophy is a necessity in some ways and it should be open to diverse voices. The diverse voices, on the other hand, are needed for philosophy. Philosophy should not turn away from the world and from experience, for that should be instead its central concern. The practice of the wartime quartet gives us an inspiring example of what such philosophy may look like. It is a philosophy of people who do not abandon common sense, who have conversations about a world common to them and in those conversations the world becomes more common and more real and their friendships stronger.Footnote ⁶⁷