El cuarteto de Oxford

At the height of the Second World War, four women began their studies at Oxford University: an extremely bright Catholic convert; a girl from a good family who longed to escape the suffocating environment in which she had been raised; a fervent communist aspiring novelist with a list of suitors longer than her arm, and the fourth: a quiet, disorderly lover of newts and mice who would become a great public intellectual of her time. They became friends for life. At that time, only a handful of women had made philosophy their way of life. But when most of Oxford's men were drafted into the war, everything changed. As Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch worked to make a place for themselves in a male-dominated world, as they built their friendships and families, as they moved closer and further apart from each other, they always argued that some ways of living are better than others. The differences in the field of moral philosophy that marked their contributions caused the most important change in the discipline for more than a century, replacing arid scholasticism with a return to discussions of goodness, virtue, and character. They argued that courage, discernment, justice and love are at the heart of a good life.