She wrote her first book, Beast and Man (1978), when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984), The Ethical Primate (1994), Evolution as a Religion (1985), and Science as Salvation (1992).

Midgley strongly opposed reductionism and scientism, and argued against any attempt to make science a substitute for the humanities.

Several of her books and articles discussed philosophical ideas appearing in popular science, including those of Richard Dawkins.

[2] Her father, the son of the eminent judge Sir Thomas Edward Scrutton, was a curate in Dulwich and later chaplain of King's College, Cambridge.

At Somerville she studied Mods and Greats alongside Iris Murdoch, graduating with a first-class honours degree.

During Midgley's time at Oxford, many of the young male undergraduates left to fight in the Second World War.

Recalling this time, Midgley writes "I think myself that this experience has something to do with the fact that Elizabeth [Anscombe] and I and Iris [Murdoch] and Philippa Foot and Mary Warnock have all made our names in philosophy...

Midgley left Oxford in 1942 and went into the civil service, as "the war put graduate work right out of the question".

She argues that one of the main flaws in doctoral training is that, while it "shows you how to deal with difficult arguments", it does not "help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context – the background issues out of which the small problems arose.

[10] Midgley stopped teaching for several years while she had three sons (Tom, David and Martin),[3] before also getting a job in the philosophy department at Newcastle, where she and her husband were both "much loved".

"[17] Midgley's book Wickedness (1984) has been described as coming "closest to addressing a theological theme: the problem of evil.

[18] Midgley also expressed her interest in Paul Davies' ideas on the inherent improbability of the order found in the universe.

"[19] She argued that people find this hard to grasp because our views on both science and religion have been narrowed so much that the connections between them are now obscured.

[19] This is not, however, about belief in a personal God, but instead about responding to the system of life, as revealed by Gaia, with "wonder, awe and gratitude"[20] She observes that "practically all the great European philosophers have been bachelors", and argues that this may be responsible for the solipsism, skepticism, and individualism that dominate the tradition.

[11] Midgley also described Gaia as a "breakthrough", as it was "the first time a theory derived from scientific measurements has carried with it an implicit moral imperative – the need to act in the interests of this living system on which we all depend.

[28] Beast and Man was an examination of human nature and a reaction against the reductionism of sociobiology, and the relativism and behaviorism she saw as prevalent in much of social science.

She concludes: "These schemes still seem to me to be just displacement activities proposed in order to avoid facing our real difficulties.

We cannot see it as a whole from above, so we peer in at it through a number of small windows ... We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles.

This means that thoughts and memories are an integral part of reality for both humans and animals and need to be studied as such.

[37] In a 1981 rebuttal, Dawkins retorted that the comment was "hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic".

In a note to page 55 in the 2nd edition of The Selfish Gene (1989), Dawkins refers to her "highly intemperate and vicious paper".

In her books Evolution as a Religion (2002) and The Myths We Live By (2003), she wrote about what she saw as his confused use of language — using terms such as "selfish" in different ways without alerting the reader to the change in meaning—and some of what she regarded as his rhetoric ("genes exert ultimate power over behaviour"), which she argued is more akin to religion than science.

She wrote in a letter to The Guardian in 2005: [There is] widespread discontent with the neo-Darwinist—or Dawkinsist—orthodoxy that claims something which Darwin himself denied, namely that natural selection is the sole and exclusive cause of evolution, making the world therefore, in some important sense, entirely random.

"[40] In April 2009 Midgley reiterated her critical interpretation of The Selfish Gene as part of a series of articles on Hobbes in The Guardian.

The main character, who also appears in Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, is concerned with the moral status of animals, a subject Midgley addressed in Animals and Why They Matter, and discusses at length the idea of sympathy as an ethical concept, a subject Midgley wrote about in Beast and Man.

[45] Midgley agreed to sit for sculptor Jon Edgar in Newcastle during 2006, as part of the Environment Triptych, along with heads of Richard Mabey and James Lovelock.