A philosopher who radically changed how we think about human nature and our duties to the non-human world did not publish her first book until she was 59. This episode pieces together the life of Mary Midgley, born Mary Scrutton in London in 1919, from a classics teacher who taught her Greek on the side to Somerville College, Oxford in 1938, where the wartime absence of male undergraduates gave her and contemporaries Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot room to rebuild moral philosophy away from point-scoring debate. It follows her abandoned doctoral thesis on Plotinus, why she considered avoiding a PhD lucky, and the years raising three sons in Newcastle that she treated as raw data on human nature.

Her return to teaching in 1962 and immersion in ethology produced her 1978 debut, which attacked both the existentialist blank  ...