What Is Philosophy For?
MARY MIDGLEY
(Bloomsbury Academic, 232 PP, £16.99)
Tablet Bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

Doing Philosophy
TIMOTHY WILLIAMSON
(Oxford University Press, 176 PP, £12.99)
Tablet Bookshop price £11.69 • tel 020 7799 4064

The redoubtable British philosopher Mary Midgley died in October last year aged 99, less than a month after the publication of What Is Philosophy For? Engaging and accessible, this vigorous swansong exemplifies many of Midgley’s virtues, and revisits many of her favourite themes. A tireless scourge of philosophical muddle, Midgley was perhaps best-known for her critique of the doctrine known as “scientism”, and in this final book she returns to the attack. Her target is not ­science itself, which she regarded as a valuable source of knowledge, but the way in which many contemporary philosophers (and some scientists) have elevated science, and the physical sciences in particular, to the status of an “oracle”, revered as the “metaphysical source of all our knowledge”.

Science, in Midgley’s persuasive account, has “succeeded to the position of authority in our culture which used to be held by religious creeds”. It is taken by many to be the final touchstone of reality. In its extreme form, this idolising of science can lead to a reductionist materialism – “nothing exists except matter and its movements” – which in turn produces what Midgley calls “soul phobia” or “soul blindness”: a refusal to allow that mind, consciousness, reasons and purposes are genuine phenomena, which can figure in perfectly valid descriptions and explanations of what human beings do.