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Mary Beatrice Midgley (née Scrutton; born 13 September 1919) is an English moral philosopher. She was a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Newcastle University and is known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, ''Beast And Man'' (1978), when she was in her fifties. Subsequently she has written over 15 other books, including ''Animals And Why They Matter'' (1983), ''Wickedness'' (1984), ''The Ethical Primate'' (1994), ''Evolution as a Religion'' (1985), and ''Science as Salvation'' (1992). She has been awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, ''The Owl of Minerva'', was published in 2005. Midgley strongly opposes reductionism and scientism, and any attempts to make science a substitute for the humanities—a role for which it is, she argues, wholly inadequate. She has written extensively about what philosophers can learn from nature, particularly from animals. A number of her books and articles have discussed philosophical ideas appearing in popular science, including those of Richard Dawkins. She has also written in favour of a moral interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis. ''The Guardian'' has described her as a fiercely combative philosopher and the UK's "foremost scourge of 'scientific pretension.'" ==Early life== Midgley was born in London to Lesley and Tom Scrutton. Her father was a curate in Dulwich, and later chaplain of King's College, Cambridge. He was the son of the eminent judge Sir Thomas Edward Scrutton. She was raised in Cambridge, Greenford, and Ealing, and educated at Downe House School in Cold Ash, Berkshire (originally based in Down House, the former home of Charles Darwin), where she developed her interest in classics and philosophy: () new and vigorous Classics teacher offered to teach a few of us Greek, and that too was somehow slotted into our timetables. We loved this and worked madly at it, which meant that with considerable efforts on all sides, it was just possible for us to go to college on Classics … I had decided to read Classics rather than English – which was the first choice that occurred to me – because my English teacher, bless her, pointed out that English literature is something that you read in any case, so it is better to study something that you otherwise wouldn't. Someone also told me that, if you did Classics at Oxford, you could do Philosophy as well. I knew very little about this but, as I had just found Plato, I couldn't resist trying it. She took the Oxford entrance exam in the autumn of 1937, gaining a place at Somerville College. During the year before starting university, it was arranged that she would live in Austria for three months to learn German, but she had to leave after a month because of the worsening political situation. At Somerville she studied Mods and Greats alongside Iris Murdoch, graduating with first-class honours. Several of her lasting friendships that began at Oxford were with scientists, and she credits them with having educated her in a number of scientific disciplines. After a split in the Labour club at Oxford over the Soviet Union's actions, she was on the committee of the newly formed Democratic Socialist Club alongside Tony Crosland and Roy Jenkins. She writes that her career in philosophy may have been affected by women having a greater voice in discussion at the time, because many male undergraduates left after a year to fight in the Second World War: "I think myself that this experience has something to do with the fact that Elizabeth () and I and Iris () and Philippa Foot and Mary Warnock have all made our names in philosophy... I do think that in normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn't get heard." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mary Midgley」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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