Abstract

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) was an undergraduate at Oxford University when her friend Elizabeth Anscombe first met Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). When Anscombe persuaded Wittgenstein to come and speak to the undergraduate students at Oxford University in the late 1940s, Midgley was there. She found Wittgenstein’s words ‘important and illuminating’, and ‘scolded herself for not having brought a notebook’ (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman 2022: 172). An Anscombe-Wittgensteinian influence is clear and informative on Midgley’s philosophy of language and meta-philosophy, but it has been scarcely explored in the literature. With this in mind, the aims of this chapter are twofold. Primarily, I aim to provide an account of Wittgenstein’s influence on Midgley’s philosophy. I do so by focusing on how Wittgenstein’s ideas influence Midgley’s meta-philosophy and philosophy of language – in particular, her use of cluster concepts (akin to family-resemblance concepts), discussion of ‘life forms’, and implicit description of something like Wittgensteinian language games (PI: 19, 23, 241).