Workshop with Elizabeth Mackintosh (Winchester) and Sarah Drews Lucas (Exeter)
Wednesday 13th May 2026, 12:40 – 14:00, Amory A239C
Sponsored by the Exeter Centre for Political Thought
Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley, contemporaries and lifelong friends, were two of the most important, if often overlooked, British philosophers of the 20th century. Each was suspicious of philosophy’s prioritisation of the choice and action of an atomistic individual, and each, albeit in different ways, saw attention as a counterweight to this reductive view of human consciousness and as the human capacity most likely to furnish a clear understanding of reality. In this conversation, we discuss Midgleyan and Murdochian approaches to the idea of attention and their implications for contemporary moral philosophy.
Dr Elizabeth (Beth) Mackintosh is a Lecturer of Philosophy and Theology and a Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow (VRF) in the School of Humanities, having taught at the University of Winchester regularly since 2015. Her background is in philosophy and theology (BA Philosophy and Theology, MA Theology, PhD Philosophy, all from Durham University), though her methodology and research are philosophical.
She is also a Fellow at the Oxford Interfaith Forum at Oxford University and is a founding Editor for H-interfaith. She has a longstanding involvement in public philosophy and school partnerships, and leads the UK leg of the (Women) In Parenthesis, Philosophy in the Wild project. She was a secondary teacher for over 20 years and was fortunate enough to be able to combine her teaching roles with academic research.
Dr Sarah Drews Lucas is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Exeter and the Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for Political Thought. Her areas of research are feminist philosophy and critical theory. She works on questions of agency, autonomy, care ethics, communicability, narrative, and personal identity. Her current projects focus on feminist narrative agency and on ordinary language philosophy and the ethics of care. She is also interested in gender and politics, ancient political theory, contemporary political theory, continental philosophy, human rights, and the work of Hannah Arendt.