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“... The Lord, having apparently grown tired of hearing a certain sort of behaviourist boloney talked about animals, seems to have designed a most unusual missile for dealing with it. The warhead consists of a skilled, experienced, professional animal trainer. The directive system – which is the most surprising component – is an acute, trained student of contemporary philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, who has paid particular attention to the work of Wittgenstein ...”

“... In what ways are people similar to other animals, and in what ways are they different? There are real problems of method about the right approach to this question, but they are nothing to the emotional ones which rise, like a buzzing cloud of insects, as soon as we approach its frontiers. The need to determine answers in advance of investigations is perhaps felt more strongly in this area than in any other outside political history – if indeed it is outside it ...”

“... Is there anyone who can keep in focus both sides of the debate about armaments, who can see fully what is meant by both armers and disarmers? To the armers, who occupy most of the positions of power, British arms, and Western arms generally, appear as the natural and only possible response to a pressing danger. They look like a roof over our heads. To the disarmers, they appear as the main source of that danger ...”

“... Out of the ivory tower troop the English-speaking moral philosophers, blinking a little, but certainly invigorated by their new freedom. Their imprisonment was a stiff one. The notion that it was rather unprofessional for them to mention the real world, and doubly so to take sides about it, became obligatory more than fifty years ago, and has only gradually loosened its grip ...”

“... If Freud were now – much against his principles – to poke his head out of the tomb and look in on us, what would he say? The appalling state of the world would of course not surprise him. But what about his own therapeutic and theoretical empire? He need scarcely be disappointed at its size, or at the number of his entries in indexes. He would still find himself named as prime mover of the movement he fought so hard to keep under his own control ...”

“... only creature that has a nasty mind.’ Why? There, in a word, you have the question addressed by Mary Midgley’s new book. It is different from the Problem of Evil as this has been traditionally known to theologians – namely, how an omnipotent and good God could create a world that has evil within. Theodicy has always been capable of interpretation ...”

“... Rich’s Of Woman Born, Selma Fraiberg’s Every Child’s Birthright: In Defence of Mothering, Mary O’Brien’s The Politics of Reproduction, Carol McMillan’s Women, Reason and Nature, as well as Women’s Choices: Philosophical Problems facing Feminism by Mary Midgley and Judith Hughes, which appears as one of ...”

“... Biology​ as a guide to ethics has been an intellectual fad of the last decade, and Mrs Midgley is trying to restore a sense of proportion. Sociobiology has had its home principally in the United States rather than in the land of Herbert Spencer, and Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard, author of Sociobiology the New Synthesis, is now the leading figure in this new, or revived, philosophy of human nature ...”

“... what we ought to do about it all. One of the most incisive and successful of these philosophers, Mary Midgley, supplies a number of pregnant quotations in Sacred Elephant from her own book Beast and Man (1978). She has indeed so much to say on the subject that one is in danger, when attempting to discuss Heathcote Williams’s work, of arguing with her ...”

“... to rubble as we speak. In this world abstract ethical considerations are entirely absent. Forget Mary Midgley, expunge all uses of the word ‘right’ other than those that define direction. There are no moral imperatives here. I don’t doubt that the ‘if you’ve never had it, you don’t need it’ argument would extend well beyond calves, but I ...”

“... Why​ should we try to understand the lives of animals? The English moral philosopher Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man (1978) ended with a succinct answer: humankind ‘can neither be understood nor saved alone’. No philosophy can hope to understand ‘human nature’, Midgley argued, without acknowledging our integration into incomparably larger and older natural systems ...”