The Earth is our Home

Subtitled 'Mary Midgley's critique and reconstruction of evolution and its meanings', this book serves as an excellent introduction to the principal themes of her work. Mary was at Oxford with an extraordinary generation of women philosophers including Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe. Having brought up a family, she began teaching philosophy at Newcastle in the same department as her husband, and published her first book at the age of nearly 60. Since then, she has been extraordinarily prolific and is still active in her 90s. The phrase philosophical plumbing is one that she has used herself to describe her work, which also offers an evolutionary epistemology closely related to ethical concerns. She is the scourge of scientism and reductivism, pointing out that the different sciences give us various maps of the universe, none of which is complete. Her knowledge of the history of ideas enables her to situate scientific thinking more widely, and she has also been a champion of Gaia theory. The book as a whole contributes to the lively debate on religious faith and biological evolution.