From a close friendship with novelist Iris Murdoch to a public spat with Richard Dawkins, Mary Midgley is one of the world’s most famous philosophers. Hannah Davies spoke to her

Mary moved to Newcastle in 1950 with Geoffrey who had secured a job at Newcastle University’s philosophy department. They have three sons.

She comments: “I liked it straight away. We always did. It was black then, a good black I thought, quite picturesque. It’s an impressive city and a lot of it is grand.

“And it wasn’t difficult to live with. We got into Jesmond right away with a lot of university people.

“ The university was smaller then and friendly.”

Mary devoted most of her time to her young children. She quips: “I thought it’d be quite a good idea to look after the children.”

But she still found time to review books for The New Statesman while feeding her babies at the same time.

Gradually she moved back into full-time work.

She says: “Part-time work became available at Newcastle when my eldest son was 12. The youngest was six, then six years later I went back full time.”

Mary’s celebrity came about through a series of events. She was asked to lead an adult education class on animal behaviour.

Mary began to publish her work in different publications. One of these caught the eye of a philosophy don at Cornell University in America and Mary was invited to do a course.

She found it fascinating. “The course was discussions with people from all sorts of different subjects, biologists, anthropologists and it was extraordinarily interesting and I developed that into a book called Beast and Man.”

Mary found herself in the limelight. “I was lucky in that there was a sort of row going on between people who wanted to say ‘there is no such thing as human nature, it’s all conditioning by society’, people in the social sciences and particularly behaviourists, and on the other hand people saying ‘there is such a thing as human nature and it’s all very bloody’ like Desmond Morris. That was very simple views of innate motives.

“I wanted to say you don’t have to apply all these things in extreme.

“The fact you have some sort of inherited instincts doesn’t mean you aren’t free to make your own choices. And they don’t have to be bloody-minded or territorial.

“And it wasn’t necessary to say, as social scientists were at that time, we’re all blank paper at birth.

“I think the reason I was to some extent successful was that people found something in the middle and I have gone on in my successive books trying to arbitrate between extreme views.”

Her views have put her in direct conflict with Richard Dawkins, author of ‘The Selfish Gene’ and recently ‘The God Delusion’.

She is cross, she explains, at the idea put forward by the likes of Dawkins that we as humans are innately selfish and individualistic.

This crossness led to her latest book, published last year called ‘The Solitary Self’.

Mary continues: “You know I had really thought I’d written too many books but then I got very indignant about the sort of dogmatic individualism expressed in The Selfish Gene and related themes, that everybody is basically selfish in the sense that they don’t actually want anything but their own advantage.

“It is actually quite unreal and it was being sold as Darwinism and it isn’t what Darwin said.”

wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.”

Mary’s philosophy is a kind of balance, a broad spectrum view which takes in philosophy, religion and science and doesn’t discount any of those branches.

But at the heart of it is a very real humanity. She says: “We are social animals, there’s no doubt about that.

“Of course to say we’re sociable doesn’t always say that we always love each other and get on well, but we have a lot of social instincts and motives about people which often clash and it’s the clashes we have to deal with.”

Mary adds that’s why she’s been drawn towards taking part in the Festival of Humanity at Northern Stage. She comments: “I quite like what these people at the festival seem to be doing. These plays all seem to be about conflicts and how they should be handled and that’s what life is about isn’t it?

“What I shall be talking about is the fact that we really are social creatures and that has been obscured by the Dawkins talk.”

Mary Midgley is in conversation with Thom Brooks, reader in political and legal philosophy at Newcastle University and ‘Oh the Humanity’ director Erica Whyman. on Thursday, September 15, at 6pm.

‘Oh the Humanity, five short plays about being alive,’ takes place from Friday, September 9, to Saturday, September 24, at 7.30pm.