Mary Midgley the Maverick

Mary Midgley was one of the pioneer female philosophers of the 20th century. A long time scourge of Richard Dawkins and his simplistic reductionist form of evolution, she accepts human beings with all their lived experiences, dreams, hopes, and values, without deconstructing them into physical and chemical parts.

But what I find particularly interesting is she echoes Einstein and C. S. Lewis' sentiments on materialistic reductionism - that the physical universe is insufficient to supply our own thoughts with the reasons for the conclusions we draw doing science or any other investigative activity. She says in Science as Saviour: A Modern Myth and its Meaning (1992);

As may be plain, this topic is essentially the one which caused Einstein often to remark that the really surprising thing about science is that it works at all. Puzzlement does not arise out of some eccentric and optional religious enquiry, but out of the simple observation that the laws of thought turn out to be the laws of things. (14)

She was also, like Thomas Nagel, somewhat of a believer in the Aristotelian notion of teleology as pervasive throughout the universe and the antidote to the Cartesian rift between mind and nature;

Some people are therefore now beginning to suspect that the mind/matter rift may be better dealt with differently – perhaps in the way that Spinoza proposed, by not letting it arise in the first place. Perhaps there are not two radically different kinds of stuff, mind and matter, but just one great world-stuff which has both mental and physical attributes, that can then quite properly be viewed without contradiction from both these angles. Then it would not be surprising if a single tendency, or conatus, runs through the whole, so that our kind of conscious purposiveness is only one part of the goal-directedness of nature.