PAGE: Perception, Action and the Genesis of Everyday Ethics. The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch

PAGE (Perception, Action and the Genesis of Everyday Ethics) is the first in depth scholarly study of the collective corpus of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. The quartet were born in 1919 and met and became friends at Oxford University during WWII. In the years immediately following the war they met regularly at Philippa Foot's house in north Oxford to set out a detailed and comprehensive philosophical response to the dominant conception of human nature, perception, action and ethics in Modern Western philosophy. Though previously unrecognised as such they are a unique case of an all-female philosophical school.

The objectives of PAGE are to chart, through scholarly and archival work, the distinctive methodology, philosophical attitude and metaphysics of the school and to demonstrate the transformative potential of its philosophy along two dimensions: (1) PAGE will show that a novel, highly distinctive and integrated philosophy of perception, action and ethics can be excavated from the collective corpus of the Quartet; (2) PAGE will use the recovery of an all-female philosophical school to disrupt the dominant historical narrative of analytic philosophy in ways that contribute, in a transformative way, to current, discipline-wide efforts to stem the attrition of female talent from philosophy.

The central research questions of this project are:

(1) What is the distinctive methodology and philosophical attitude of the Quartet when read as a school? Do they have a unified metaphysical orientation? What core concepts articulate their philosophical world-view? In what ways does their philosophy and method resist detachment from the everyday and practical?

(2) What integrated theory of perception, action and ethics emerges from reading all four women together as a school? What core concepts, uncovered in (1) above, ground that unified picture? In what ways does their method and attitude lead to an integrated picture?

(3) In what ways is the school's methodology and metaphysics continuous or discontinuous with analytic philosophical enquiry as it is currently conceived? In what ways does it eschew masculinist disciplinary norms and scientism? How can this method be modelled in current pedagogical and professional practice? What image of the philosopher and of philosophical enquiry emerges from a study of the Quartet?

PAGE will inspire women to do philosophy - including having careers in Philosophy - by offering as a model an school of female philosophers and a philosophical method that is collaborative and 'everyday'. It will ensure the female voice receives proper recognition in the history of wartime and post-wartime British Philosophy and in the development of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The initial Impact Pathways focus on women and girls in Ireland and the UK, but there are clear opportunities to develop impact in North America as well as continental Europe (see Legacy & Evaluation).

Impact will initially be along two pathways, targeted at two audience-groups. First, audiences in 14-18 education in Ireland and the UK: head-teachers, teachers, school children, exam boards. Second, public audiences: mainstream media, social media, exhibition audiences, reading groups. We will establish an Impact Steering Group comprised of PI, CI, PDRA McKinnell, our impact administrator, Chris Williams (Faculty Impact Lead University of Liverpool), Rachael Barnwell (Faculty Impact Lead University of Durham), Lauren Waddington, Institute of Irish Studies (University of Liverpool), Sarah Banks (University of Durham), Annie MacCallion (PhD candidate Manchester/Liverpool), Andrew Gray (Archivist, Palace Green Archives, Durham), Aine Mahon (UCD, Dublin), two teachers and one headteacher. The group will advise on Legacy and Evaluation, as well as resource development, and will meet twice over the course of the project and will communicate frequently via the project email list with ad hoc Skype meetings as required.