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Philosophers like to talk a lot, but must also take listening seriously. As Mary Midgley puts it in her paper ‘Philosophizing Out in the World’, philosophers must ‘listen to everyone and cast their nets [widely] before starting to draw… new maps’ (1985, p. 461). In this same paper, and elsewhere, Midgley makes a powerful case for listening in the human sense and highlights how listening has been neglected and led to a sort of epistemic blind spot which blocked an appropriate response to our fellow humans and those at the ‘outer darkness’ (1983, p. 65). Listening, as part of conversation, is a key tenet of our similarities with other animals, and listening is part of how we order and shape our lives. It is a central tool, I will argue, to repairing our relationships with each other, with animals and with the natural world, and should be a more central concern within moral philosophy and education. In short, we need new ways to fall in love with the world again, and listening is one such bridge.
Midgley’s ‘plumbing work’ is a crucial methodology for working within moral education, where we will need tools to recognise past failures and to diagnose key issues, as well as repair them, and not further compound the damage. The (Women) In Parenthesis research project, Philosophy in the Wild – Finding Hope in Mixed Communities, is a concrete exploration of what Midgley’s ‘mixed community’ can be, and her work is an invitation to explore multispecies communities and to consider the unknown interlocutor and what that might look like. Listening requires trust, hope and an openness to the possibility that ‘our interlocutor may convey what is yet unknown, unexpected or even what may actually be necessary for our own constant renovation’ (Corradi Fiumara, 1990: 154).
In this paper I will explore how the listening tools offered by Midgley, Gemma Corradi Fiumara and others became a focus for the Philosophy in the Wild global journey, a project inspired by Midgley’s work and her beloved biscuit tin. Philosophy in the Wild’s Team Wales, the first and one of the 13 global teams and sites of hope, created workshops and educational resources that have now spawned across Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Swansea and beyond.
