Background
Warnock, Helen Mary was born on April 14, 1924 in Winchester.
Warnock, Helen Mary was born on April 14, 1924 in Winchester.
St Swithun's. Winchester, and Lady Margaret Hall.
1949-1966, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, St Hugh’s College, Oxford. 1966-1972, Headmistress of Oxford High School. 1972-1976; Talbot Research Fellow, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
1976-1984, Senior Research Fellow, St Hugh’s College, Oxford. 1985-1992, Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. From 1992, Life Fellow, Girton College, Cambridge.
Main publications:
(1960) Ethics since 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(1965) The Philosophy of Sartre, London: Hutchinson.
(1966) Existentialist Ethics, London: Macmillan. (1970) Existentialism, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
(1976) Imagination. London: Faber & Faber.
(1977) Schools of Thought. London: Faber & Faber. (1977) (with T. Devlin) What Must We Teach?,
London: Temple Smith.
(1979) Education: A Way Forward, Oxford: Blackwell.
(1985) A Question of Life, Oxford: Blackwell.
(1987) Memory, London: Faber & Faber.
(1988) A Common Policy for Education, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(1989) Universities: Knowing Our Minds, London: Chatto & Windus.
(1992) The Uses of Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell.
(1994) Imagination and Time, Oxford: Blackwell.
(1995) (ed.) Women Philosophers. London: Everyman.
In the latter half of the twentieth century Warnock has been widely influential in the formulation of policy in education, environmental issues, animal experimentation and human fertilization, having chaired government committees dealing with these matters. Her early writings are concerned with ethics and existentialism or, more precisely, ethics in existentialism. Critical of the Marxist tendency dogmatically to subsume the individual under a collectivity, she maintained that what had suffered above all else was the status of philosophy itself, and that the salvaging of both philosophy and existentialism was bound up with the resuscitation of the social person as against the ‘subjective anti-scientific dogmatism’ of much metaphysics.
Her work in the philosophy of education shows a similar anti-theoretical stance.
In Schools of Thought (1977) she argued that the Socratic question about the possibility of teaching virtue is intimately related not only to moral but also to political questions. That there are no educational criteria devoid of moral and political constituents. And that to attempt to conceptualize an educational good without regard to its political resonances is to misunderstand its moral aspects and the vinculations that morality has with political expediency.
What she sees as decisive in setting the curriculum content are ‘the twin values of work and the expanding imagination’.
Her claim that there must exist some specialized forum for reflection on what should be taught was taken up in Universities: Knowing Our Minds (1989) where she argued that an intellectual elite is a necessary element in society and that it should not be dictated to from outside but must be free to declare its views without restraint. In Imagination (1976) she traced the development of that concept, concluding that its cultivation should be the highest goal of an enlightened education. Warnock is primarily a moral philosopher working in the fields of education and medical ethics.
Her ability to show the relationships between theory and practice, and to demonstrate the value of practical reasoning and philosophical thinking in general, has rendered her work important and influential.
