MARY MIDGLEY once famously crossed swords with Richard Dawkins in a heated but ultimately unproductive row over the metaphor of the selfish gene. This incident is strangely absent in The Owl of Minerva, a warm and humorous memoir by one of the UK’s leading moral philosophers and critic of reductionism in science. The book reveals a now-lost world that served as the background to the intellectual passions, not just of Midgley, who is 86, but of a generation of British women philosophers.
Midgley is the daughter of a Church of England clergyman and the granddaughter of a judge. She grew…
