The Somerville-group and the introduction of historical arguments in philosophy
Historical argument have long been neglected within the confines of analytic philosophy, to the point of being seen as being a significant trait of the movement itself. This differs sharply from the historically anchored argumentative techniques common in continental thought. This has resulted in mutual incomprehension of the other. Recent developments have however pointed towards a change, largely due contributions by McIntyre, Taylor, McDowell and Williams. The project aims to highlight and analyse the neglected much earlier pioneering efforts made by Anscombe and Murdoch, sparsely mentioned by the previously mentioned group of thinkers. Both Anscombe and Murdoch belong to the Somerville group, which is currently the focus of several efforts. Ongoing research in England and the United States, however, have not focused on the group’s historical arguments. These arguments remain unexplored. The project has an interdisciplinary methodological approach, combining intellectual history, philosophy, extensive archival research, historical contextualization, and argument analysis and evaluation.
Final report
Final report
The Somerville Group and the Introduction of Historical Arguments in Philosophy
(P19-0937:1)
Aim and development of the project
The purpose of the project was to study how historical arguments, which have long been neglected within the confines of analytic philosophy, arose partly out of the pioneering efforts made by the Somerville Group—a group of philosophers in post-war Oxford including G. E. M. Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot, and Mary Midgley. By doing this, the view of the members of the Somerville Group as lesser figures in the main analytic tradition could be revised. The hypothesis was that the failure to appreciate what these philosophers did was due to their new view of the task of philosophy: to bring philosophy back to real-life problems. An integral part of this programme was that concepts must be studied within historical contexts.
The project employed an interdisciplinary methodology that combined intellectual history and philosophy, archival research in the United Kingdom and historical contextualization with the analysis and evaluation of arguments.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the planned archival studies in England had to be postponed, which resulted in delays and significant restructuring of the project, which came to depend much more on accessible publications and argument analysis than initially planned. Gåvertsson was able to take on a heavy teaching load, thus alleviating project costs, until the UK lockdown was lifted and archival studies could commence. The PI was also able to acquire scans of archival material from the Anscombe Archives housed at the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture, Philadelphia, PA, which significantly reduced travel costs and made some archival material available for study during the pandemic.
Another consideration was that the state of research changed as a result of two publications, Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals (London 2022), and Benjamin Lipscombe, The Women Are Up to Something (Oxford 2021), both of which explored the group perspective through historical contextualization and on the basis of archival sources, i.e. the same type of work that, after the pandemic, once again became possible to carry out but which, due to these publications, would no longer contribute new knowledge.
Taken together, this meant that the study of the group-in-development from both a knowledge-sociological and an intellectual-historical viewpoint that was originally projected was, on the one hand, not feasible as planned because of the pandemic and, on the other, no longer appeared as urgent once the pandemic was over. Archival research in the Iris Murdoch archive at Kingston University, London, and in the archives at Somerville College, Oxford, became complementary rather than foundational.
For various reasons it was considered appropriate to replace the planned joint writing of articles with individual writing, while the archival research in the United Kingdom in 2024 was carried out jointly. Likewise, a national workshop in 2024 and an international conference in 2025 were planned and carried out jointly. The envisaged interdisciplinarity has borne fruit in a number of presentations, the aforementioned workshop, an edited volume currently in production, and a network for the history of philosophy.
The scholarly development within the project can be divided into a theoretical and an empirical strand.
The theoretical development has led to diverging interpretations within the project regarding the value of group analysis, where the principal investigator, Hansson, maintains that, after a closer study of the philosophers’ publications and the biographical-historical material (both the publications and the archival material in England), a new understanding is required of the philosophers’ interaction, one that does not necessarily take as its point of departure a philosophical collective involving all four philosophers. Gåvertsson, by contrast, continues to hold that group analysis is meaningful at least from a methodological perspective.
Furthermore, the historico-theoretical development within the project has led to a stronger focus on genealogy as a form of historical argumentation, which is nonetheless in accordance with the planned philosophical evaluation and taxonomization of the historical arguments put forth by the members of the Somerville Group. Studies of the four philosophers’ use of the genealogical method will be published in an English-language monograph by Gåvertsson, and the results have partly also been presented in an article in Swedish as well as at a number of conferences. Moreover, Gåvertsson has explored the metaphysical aspects of the genealogical approach that the project has identified in the group. These results, too, have been presented at several conferences.
On the empirical-historiographical level, the development has led to (a) a concentration on a key text, Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), whose great significance for the history of ideas the project has been able to confirm. The text is the subject of an article by Hansson. The analysis has not yet been completed, partly because of difficulties in evaluating new archival material from the Anscombe archives in the USA, but the main lines of the interpretation were already presented in 2022 at a seminar at Stockholm University. The article should be ready to be submitted for publication shortly. Furthermore, (b) the planned investigation of the historical-contextual determination of the group’s position in post-war philosophy, including the ways in which the group inspired a younger generation of Anglo-American philosophers to work with historical narratives and genealogy, has ended in an exclusive emphasis on the role played by Anscombe and Murdoch. One article by Hansson deals with this; it has been presented as a paper at an international conference in 2025. With regard to the reception of historical argumentation among a younger generation of philosophers, this could be shown in particular in three cases: Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. How this occurred is treated in a third article by Hansson, in an anthology co-edited by the project participants.
The project’s three most important results
1. Theoretical result: The investigation of historical arguments in philosophy has resulted in a taxonomy of genealogies that further develops and nuances previous interpretations of genealogy as a philosophical method.
2. Empirical result: The hypothesis concerning the importance of Anscombe and Murdoch for the historical turn within English-language philosophy has been confirmed and has been demonstrated in detail through evidence of their influence on later developments, and has been theoretically explained on the basis of the thesis about the connection between the critique of modernity and historical philosophy.
3. Practical result: An interdisciplinary network in the history of philosophy has been created. A first manifestation of this is an anthology edited by the project participants.
Conclusions
1. One conclusion is that Foot and Midgley have not, in the same way as Anscombe and Murdoch, contributed to promoting an awareness of and an interest in historical argumentation.
2. Another conclusion is that the philosophers, as a collective, have not had any impact on the interest in historical argumentation, but that Anscombe and Murdoch each, perhaps under mutual influence, have played an important role in this respect.
3. A third conclusion is that the group concept, with certain reservations, can be applied as an analytical concept, and that it opens our eyes to common features in their philosophical methodology. A methodological convergence among the four philosophers can be demonstrated, and, furthermore, a historical perspective can be discerned in each case.
4. The historical argumentation in Anscombe and Murdoch creates an understanding of philosophy’s interaction with modern culture, which has led to a more general conclusion about the decisive importance of the critique of modernity for the development of a historical philosophy.
5. Genealogy as a type of argumentation has turned out to be more widespread than was previously known.
New research questions
1. One question is whether a group-based approach would not also be advantageous in other cases of research in the history of philosophy and ideas. A similar methodological stance ought to be fruitful in the study of other (loose-knit) groups of philosophers neglected by previous research such as the so-called Bluestockings Society, an informal group of female intellectuals—including Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney, Hester Thrale, Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Benger, Elizabeth Hamilton and Marianne Francis—including that have occasionally been recognised as important early advocates of women’s rights and as feminist trailblazers.
2. The so-called historical turn in analytic philosophy from the late twentieth century is still largely unexplored. The project provides certain theoretical and historiographical tools for analysing this development. Given that the turn dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, its status in the present is also an open question. Further mapping is needed here.
3. More reflection and empirical studies would be needed in order to establish the significance of historical argumentation for the boundary-drawing between analytic and continental philosophy since the late twentieth century. The question has to some extent been addressed (among other things in an article by Gåvertsson), but deserves to be treated in a separate project.
How the project group has disseminated the research and the results
The research and results of the project have been disseminated through various publications, including in an anthology edited by the two applicants. Hansson’s contribution is disseminated primarily through three articles, one of which is already ready for print. Gåvertsson’s research is brought together in a monograph and a number of articles.
In addition, the research has been presented at several workshops and at national as well as international conferences. Furthermore, it has been presented at seminars, on radio and television, and in a podcast. More detailed information is provided in the list of publications.
Forms of collaboration
Collaboration has taken place primarily with the project In Parenthesis at Durham University, the Mapping the Quartet project, and within the network for the history of philosophy in Sweden that it has been possible to establish thanks to the project funding.
The Somerville Group and the Introduction of Historical Arguments in Philosophy
(P19-0937:1)
Aim and development of the project
The purpose of the project was to study how historical arguments, which have long been neglected within the confines of analytic philosophy, arose partly out of the pioneering efforts made by the Somerville Group—a group of philosophers in post-war Oxford including G. E. M. Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot, and Mary Midgley. By doing this, the view of the members of the Somerville Group as lesser figures in the main analytic tradition could be revised. The hypothesis was that the failure to appreciate what these philosophers did was due to their new view of the task of philosophy: to bring philosophy back to real-life problems. An integral part of this programme was that concepts must be studied within historical contexts.
The project employed an interdisciplinary methodology that combined intellectual history and philosophy, archival research in the United Kingdom and historical contextualization with the analysis and evaluation of arguments.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the planned archival studies in England had to be postponed, which resulted in delays and significant restructuring of the project, which came to depend much more on accessible publications and argument analysis than initially planned. Gåvertsson was able to take on a heavy teaching load, thus alleviating project costs, until the UK lockdown was lifted and archival studies could commence. The PI was also able to acquire scans of archival material from the Anscombe Archives housed at the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture, Philadelphia, PA, which significantly reduced travel costs and made some archival material available for study during the pandemic.
Another consideration was that the state of research changed as a result of two publications, Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals (London 2022), and Benjamin Lipscombe, The Women Are Up to Something (Oxford 2021), both of which explored the group perspective through historical contextualization and on the basis of archival sources, i.e. the same type of work that, after the pandemic, once again became possible to carry out but which, due to these publications, would no longer contribute new knowledge.
Taken together, this meant that the study of the group-in-development from both a knowledge-sociological and an intellectual-historical viewpoint that was originally projected was, on the one hand, not feasible as planned because of the pandemic and, on the other, no longer appeared as urgent once the pandemic was over. Archival research in the Iris Murdoch archive at Kingston University, London, and in the archives at Somerville College, Oxford, became complementary rather than foundational.
For various reasons it was considered appropriate to replace the planned joint writing of articles with individual writing, while the archival research in the United Kingdom in 2024 was carried out jointly. Likewise, a national workshop in 2024 and an international conference in 2025 were planned and carried out jointly. The envisaged interdisciplinarity has borne fruit in a number of presentations, the aforementioned workshop, an edited volume currently in production, and a network for the history of philosophy.
The scholarly development within the project can be divided into a theoretical and an empirical strand.
The theoretical development has led to diverging interpretations within the project regarding the value of group analysis, where the principal investigator, Hansson, maintains that, after a closer study of the philosophers’ publications and the biographical-historical material (both the publications and the archival material in England), a new understanding is required of the philosophers’ interaction, one that does not necessarily take as its point of departure a philosophical collective involving all four philosophers. Gåvertsson, by contrast, continues to hold that group analysis is meaningful at least from a methodological perspective.
Furthermore, the historico-theoretical development within the project has led to a stronger focus on genealogy as a form of historical argumentation, which is nonetheless in accordance with the planned philosophical evaluation and taxonomization of the historical arguments put forth by the members of the Somerville Group. Studies of the four philosophers’ use of the genealogical method will be published in an English-language monograph by Gåvertsson, and the results have partly also been presented in an article in Swedish as well as at a number of conferences. Moreover, Gåvertsson has explored the metaphysical aspects of the genealogical approach that the project has identified in the group. These results, too, have been presented at several conferences.
On the empirical-historiographical level, the development has led to (a) a concentration on a key text, Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958), whose great significance for the history of ideas the project has been able to confirm. The text is the subject of an article by Hansson. The analysis has not yet been completed, partly because of difficulties in evaluating new archival material from the Anscombe archives in the USA, but the main lines of the interpretation were already presented in 2022 at a seminar at Stockholm University. The article should be ready to be submitted for publication shortly. Furthermore, (b) the planned investigation of the historical-contextual determination of the group’s position in post-war philosophy, including the ways in which the group inspired a younger generation of Anglo-American philosophers to work with historical narratives and genealogy, has ended in an exclusive emphasis on the role played by Anscombe and Murdoch. One article by Hansson deals with this; it has been presented as a paper at an international conference in 2025. With regard to the reception of historical argumentation among a younger generation of philosophers, this could be shown in particular in three cases: Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. How this occurred is treated in a third article by Hansson, in an anthology co-edited by the project participants.
The project’s three most important results
1. Theoretical result: The investigation of historical arguments in philosophy has resulted in a taxonomy of genealogies that further develops and nuances previous interpretations of genealogy as a philosophical method.
2. Empirical result: The hypothesis concerning the importance of Anscombe and Murdoch for the historical turn within English-language philosophy has been confirmed and has been demonstrated in detail through evidence of their influence on later developments, and has been theoretically explained on the basis of the thesis about the connection between the critique of modernity and historical philosophy.
3. Practical result: An interdisciplinary network in the history of philosophy has been created. A first manifestation of this is an anthology edited by the project participants.
Conclusions
1. One conclusion is that Foot and Midgley have not, in the same way as Anscombe and Murdoch, contributed to promoting an awareness of and an interest in historical argumentation.
2. Another conclusion is that the philosophers, as a collective, have not had any impact on the interest in historical argumentation, but that Anscombe and Murdoch each, perhaps under mutual influence, have played an important role in this respect.
3. A third conclusion is that the group concept, with certain reservations, can be applied as an analytical concept, and that it opens our eyes to common features in their philosophical methodology. A methodological convergence among the four philosophers can be demonstrated, and, furthermore, a historical perspective can be discerned in each case.
4. The historical argumentation in Anscombe and Murdoch creates an understanding of philosophy’s interaction with modern culture, which has led to a more general conclusion about the decisive importance of the critique of modernity for the development of a historical philosophy.
5. Genealogy as a type of argumentation has turned out to be more widespread than was previously known.
New research questions
1. One question is whether a group-based approach would not also be advantageous in other cases of research in the history of philosophy and ideas. A similar methodological stance ought to be fruitful in the study of other (loose-knit) groups of philosophers neglected by previous research such as the so-called Bluestockings Society, an informal group of female intellectuals—including Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Frances Burney, Hester Thrale, Sally Wesley, Elizabeth Benger, Elizabeth Hamilton and Marianne Francis—including that have occasionally been recognised as important early advocates of women’s rights and as feminist trailblazers.
2. The so-called historical turn in analytic philosophy from the late twentieth century is still largely unexplored. The project provides certain theoretical and historiographical tools for analysing this development. Given that the turn dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, its status in the present is also an open question. Further mapping is needed here.
3. More reflection and empirical studies would be needed in order to establish the significance of historical argumentation for the boundary-drawing between analytic and continental philosophy since the late twentieth century. The question has to some extent been addressed (among other things in an article by Gåvertsson), but deserves to be treated in a separate project.
How the project group has disseminated the research and the results
The research and results of the project have been disseminated through various publications, including in an anthology edited by the two applicants. Hansson’s contribution is disseminated primarily through three articles, one of which is already ready for print. Gåvertsson’s research is brought together in a monograph and a number of articles.
In addition, the research has been presented at several workshops and at national as well as international conferences. Furthermore, it has been presented at seminars, on radio and television, and in a podcast. More detailed information is provided in the list of publications.
Forms of collaboration
Collaboration has taken place primarily with the project In Parenthesis at Durham University, the Mapping the Quartet project, and within the network for the history of philosophy in Sweden that it has been possible to establish thanks to the project funding.