Mary Midgley

Mary Midgley is a professional philosopher whose special interests are in the relations between humans and the rest of nature, and in the troubled frontier between science and religion (particularly in cases where science becomes a religion). She is at present working on the concept of Gaia.

Born in 1919 she took her university degree in Classics, Philosophy and Ancient History at Oxford during the war. After graduate work, she lectured in Philosophy, first at the University of Reading, then at that of Newcastle on Tyne, where she became a Senior Lecturer. She still lives in Newcastle.

She is the author of many books including THE ETHICAL PRIMATE, SCIENCE AS SALVATION, UTOPIAS, DOLPHINS AND COMPUTERS and ANIMALS AND WHY THEY MATTER for which she was awarded in 1986, jointly with Konrad Lorenz, the Premio Gambrinus Giuseppe Mazzotti.

The daughter of a pacifist rector who answered 'no!' when his congregation asked him 'Is everything in the bible true?', perhaps Mary Midgley was destined to become a philosopher. Yet few would have thought this iinquisitive, untidy, nature-loving child would become 'one of the sharpest critical pens in the West'.

Plainly told, like her philosophy, this is an elegiac and moving account of friendships found and lost, bitter philosophical battles and of a profound love of teaching all too rarely acknowledged today.