Mary Midgley, Moral Philosopher for the General Reader, Is Dead at 99

Mary Midgley, a leading British moral philosopher who became an accessible, persistent and sometimes witty critic of the view that modern science should be the sole arbiter of reality, died on Wednesday, less than three weeks after her last book was published, in Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne. She was 99.

Her death was confirmed by Ian Ground, who teaches philosophy at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, where Midgley taught for many years.

Midgley wrote more than a dozen books for a general audience, beginning when she was in her late 50s and continuing well into her 90s. Her last book, “What Is Philosophy For?,” was published by Bloomsbury Academic on Sept. 20.

“Not many authors can be known to publish a book in their 100th year,” the publisher said in a statement, adding, “Its quality and remarkable insights do not fall short of the brilliant mind that penned it.” The biologist Stephen Rose, writing in The Times Literary Supplement in 1992, called Midgley “a philosopher with what many have come to admire, and some to fear, as one of the sharpest critical pens in the West.”

Andrew Brown, writing in The Guardian in 1981, called her “the foremost scourge of scientific pretension in this country.”

Midgley unhesitatingly challenged scientists like the entomologist Edward O. Wilson and the biologist, and noted atheist, Richard Dawkins. By her lights they practiced a rigid “academic imperialism” when they tried to extend scientific findings to the social sciences and the humanities.

In place of what she saw as their constricted, “reductionistic” worldview, she proposed a holistic approach in which “many maps” — that is, varied ways of looking at life — are used to get to the nub of what is real.

One challenge came in 1978 in her first book, “Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature,” based on a conference she had organized on that slippery, perennial subject as a visiting scholar at Cornell University.

She was later asked to revise her original manuscript to reflect her critical reaction to Wilson’s best-selling 1975 book, “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” (“a volume the size of a paving stone,” she wrote later in a well-received 2005 autobiography, “The Owl of Minerva”). She described the field of sociobiology as a kind of reactionary “biological Thatcherism.”

Sociobiology — the application of gene-centered theories of natural selection to the social life of organisms — was not itself overly controversial, especially, as Wilson originally used it, in the study of ants and insects. Midgley, given her own interest in emphasizing humans’ animal nature — that “we are not, and do not need to be, disembodied intellects” — praised parts of Wilson’s book. What provoked her and others was his hypothesis that the tenets of sociobiology could be applied to humans. That idea, according to scholars, threatened to radically revise generally accepted notions of human nature.

“The term ‘human nature’ is suspect because it does suggest cure-all explanations, sweeping theories that man is basically sexual, basically selfish or acquisitive, basically evil or basically good,” Midgley wrote in “Beast and Man.”

In “The Owl of Minerva,” she wrote that the need to address Wilson’s concepts had distracted readers from her crucial topic: “the meaning of rationality itself — the fact that reason can’t mean just deductive logic but must cover what makes sense for beings who have a certain sort of emotional nature.”

She added that “Beast and Man” remained “the trunk out of which all my various later ideas have branched.”

Midgley took pains to distinguish between the important contributions of science and the philosophy of “scientism,” in which “prophets,” she wrote, decree that science is “not just omnicompetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking.”

“We do not need to esteem science less,” she continued. “We need to stop isolating it artificially from the rest of our mental life.”

Midgley did not align herself with any specific school of thought: She wrote that moral philosophy and plain “common sense” often covered the same ground. She targeted what she saw as some of the basic errors of modern scientific orthodoxy, including misplaced objectivity, the exclusion of purpose and motive, and the propensity to depersonalize nature.

The very titles of her books — among them “Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning” (1992) and “Evolution as a Religion” (1985) — and even irreverent chapter headings, like “Knowledge Considered as a Weed Killer,” conveyed her stance against what she called the “parsimonious” worldview of science.

In 1979, in the journal Philosophy, she issued a scathing critique of Dawkins’ widely popular book “The Selfish Gene,” taking issue with what she called his “crude, cheap, blurred genetics.”

In that book, Dawkins suggested that evolution is a product of an innate drive in genes to perpetuate themselves, “selfishly,” through the vehicle of a given species, and that the behavior of living things is in service to their genes.

She refuted the notion that selfishness underpinned all life.

“Just as there would be no word for white if everything was white, there could surely be no word for selfish if everyone was always selfish,” she wrote, adding, “Selfishness cannot, then, be a universal condition.”

In a long career as a published philosopher, Midgley addressed a great number of subjects. Evolution, the importance of animals, the role of science in society, cognitive science, feminism and human nature all came under her scrutiny.

She ranged more widely in “Science and Poetry” (2001), in which she considered the place of the imagination in human life. She found excesses of materialism and fatalism in human life, discussed the unusual compatibility of physics and religion, and approved of philosophical and metaphorical aspects of the Gaia hypothesis, which looks at the earth as a living system.

“With this book,” Brian Appleyard wrote in The Sunday Times of London, “Professor Midgley establishes herself as the most cool, coherent and sane critic of contemporary superstition that we have.”

She was born Mary Scrutton on Sept. 13, 1919, in Dulwich, England, to Lesley (Hay) and Tom Scrutton. Her father, a church curate, became a chaplain of King’s College, Cambridge, before the family moved to Greenford, now a suburb west of London, where he became vicar of Greenford and where Mary and her elder brother, Hugh (later a prominent art gallery director), grew up.

When she was 12 Mary attended Downe House, a progressive boarding school that had begun in Charles Darwin’s home, though it later moved to Ash Green, near Newbury.

She began classes at Oxford University in 1938 and quickly found herself in a heady academic environment. Her fellow philosophy students included Iris Murdoch, who became a good friend and eventually a Booker Prize-winning novelist; Philippa Foot, who became a leading moral philosopher; and Elizabeth Anscombe, who later went by G.E.M. Anscombe as a published philosopher and was a prominent disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s.

In 1950 Mary Scrutton married the philosophy instructor Geoffrey Midgley, whom she had met at Oxford. The couple had three sons in five years, during which time she gave up a teaching career and reviewed novels and children’s books for The New Statesman.

Her husband died in 1997. She is survived by her sons, Tom, David and Martin, and three grandchildren. David Midgley edited the book “The Essential Mary Midgley” (2005).

Midgley returned to teaching philosophy in 1965, as a lecturer at Newcastle University. She later became senior lecturer. It was while teaching there, well into her 50s, that she began publishing the work for which she would be acclaimed.

Not that she envisioned a long career of expounding on her philosophical views in a succession of books. She wrote more as a critic, she suggested, responding to what she heard or read.

“I keep thinking that I shall have no more to say,” she told The Guardian in 2001, “and then finding some wonderfully idiotic doctrine which I can contradict.”