Moral Education for Metaphysical Animals 

David Bakhurst (Queen’s University, Ontario)    

5.30 – 7.15pm

Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals and Benjamin Lipscombe’s The Women Are Up to Something provide fascinating insights into the life and work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley. Students together in Oxford in the 1940s, their subsequent work challenged philosophical orthodoxies of the day.  My paper explores their insight regarding the understanding of education, particularly moral education.  The Quartet’s style of moral philosophy has been developed by others, but many illuminating ideas remain unexplored.  As Metaphysical Animals reveals, this philosophy is very much alive. Equally alive are enduring impediments to its proper understanding.

David Bakhurst is George Whalley Distinguished University Professor at Queen’s University, Ontario.  His Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (Cambridge, 1991) represents the first critical history of Soviet philosophical culture.  The primary research was conducted in Moscow under the mentorship of Felix Mikhailov.  Bakhurst has also written extensively on epistemology, metaphysics, Wittgenstein, ethics and philosophy of education.  His publications include The Formation of Reason (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and Education and Conversation (Bloomsbury, 2016), the latter co-edited with Paul Fairfield.  Bakhurst is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Executive Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education