A WOMAN, who was part of a quartet of celebrated female philosophers who met at Oxford University during the 1940s, has died aged 99.

Mary Midgley was one of the first to write seriously about our ethical responsibility to animals and the environment, with Animals and Why They Matter, The Ethical Primate and Wickedness among her most famous works.

The moral philosopher came to wider public attention in the 1980s due to a ongoing dispute with evolutionary biologist and Oxford professor Richard Dawkins over his book The Selfish Gene, criticising the scientist for a narrow 'ideological' and 'reductionist' stance.

In recent years her time at Oxford University, which she attended from 1938, and her relationship with contemporaries Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, who became a close friend, and Philippa Foot has received revived interest.

The four women are being celebrated for their contribution to 20th century philosophy in a series of lectures this autumn at the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London.

In autobiography The Owl of Minerva (2005), she put down the success of the women to 'pushy men' being largely absent from Oxford during the war, writing: “I do think that in normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn’t get heard.”

Mary Beatrice Scrutton was born on September 13, 1919, in London, where her father Tom Scrutton was a curate. He later became chaplain at King’s College, Cambridge.

She won a scholarship to Somerville College to read Classics Mods and Greats in 1938, graduating with a first in 1942 at the height of the Second World War.

Further study was postponed while she took up a position with the civil service war effort, and from 1945 to 1947 was secretary to the classical scholar Gilbert Murray.

After this she returned to philosophy, starting a thesis at Oxford University she never completed on the psychology of Plotinus, tutoring at Somerville and lecturing at Reading University from 1948 until 1950.

She then married Geoffrey Midgley, also a philosopher and who died in 1997, moving with him to Newcastle where he took up a teaching position at what would become Newcastle University.

She paused her own academic career while she had and raised three sons before returning in 1965 to become a lecturer and later senior lecturer at Newcastle. In 1980 she took early retirement to have more time to write.

Mary Midgely died on October 10, at her home in Newcastle.