Books by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
The Murdochian Mind, 2022
Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist of extraordinary breadth and originality whose work d... more Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist of extraordinary breadth and originality whose work defies simple categorisation. Her philosophical writing engages with an astonishingly wide range of figures, from Plato and Kant to Sartre and Heidegger, and her work increasingly inspires debate in ethics, aesthetics, religion, and literature.
The Murdochian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full span of Murdoch's philosophical work, comprising 37 specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of leading scholars. Divided into five clear parts, the volume covers the following areas:
A guide to Murdoch's key philosophical texts, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
Core themes and concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, such as love, moral vision, and attention.
Murdoch's engagement with the history of philosophy, including Plato, Kant, Hegel, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein.
Interdisciplinary connections with art, literature, and religion, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
Murdoch and contemporary philosophical debates, including feminism, virtue ethics, and metaethics.
The application of Murdoch’s thought to applied ethics, including animal ethics, psychiatric ethics, and the environment.
Although recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in Murdoch’s philosophy, The Murdochian Mind is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. As such it will be of great interest to students of philosophy, especially ethics and aesthetics, as well as those in related disciplines such as literature, religion, and gender studies.
where she is a member of PEriTiA (Horizon 2020). She is co-editor of The Murdochian Mind (Routled... more where she is a member of PEriTiA (Horizon 2020). She is co-editor of The Murdochian Mind (Routledge 2022) and has co-edited and co-translated Simone Weil's Venice Saved (Bloomsbury 2019). This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning of what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. Introduction This book In this book I propose an 'ethics of attention': a meta ethical and normative view that takes attention to be central. My claim in this book is that attention is fundamental to morality. It returns the experience of a reality from which distraction, defenses, or projection separate us. That, in itself, makes us better, more open and less self-concerned. Every time, often imperceptibly, attention shapes us and our world. It constitutes the
Papers by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Balthazar, 2024
One of the most common, and most obvious, reasons for ethical veganism is to save animal lives an... more One of the most common, and most obvious, reasons for ethical veganism is to save animal lives and reduce suffering. This reason is based on broadly consequentialist thinking: animal consumption causes suffering and death; reducing the demand will reduce the number of animals bred and raised for exploitation and slaughter. There are well known intermediaries along this causal chain, as the great majority of consumers of animal products rely on others to bring the animal, their parts of products, to their table. On a large market, this means that a single vegan will make a very small difference to the scale of production. Vegans therefore rely on a critical mass, actual and hoped for, to achieve the practical outcome of reducing suffering and death. Even just one animal spared (meaning not brought into the world to be used and killed throughout her short life) is a significant achievement, for each animal brought into the world in this way loses everything. But there are cases in which even the contribution of a larger group cannot achieve this aim, and these are the situations in which justifications for a vegan dietfor it is still and typically the case that it is the vegan who is called to justify her practice, presumably because of her divergence from the normtake a different and not fully explored turn. These are situations in which whether one consumes or not the steak, cheese, or egg in question will not have any impact whatsoever on the production or any existing animal. Someone is about to throw away a piece of cheese, for instance, and offers it to you. Eating it will make no practical difference, in fact, it will reduce waste of what is, biologically at least, an edible item. Consequentialist considerations about saving a life do not work here. One answer can be that refusing to eat animal products, even without any expected shortterm consequence for the animal, can signal to others the existence of a different way of living alongside animals, one where we do not consider them and the products of their bodies,
The Journal of Ethics, 2024
The phenomenon of moral transformation, though important, has received little attention in virtue... more The phenomenon of moral transformation, though important, has received little attention in virtue ethics. In this paper we propose a virtue-ethical model of moral transformation as character transformation by tracking the development of new identity-defining (‘core’) character traits, their expressions, and their priority structure, through the change in what appears as possible or impossible to the moral agent. We propose that character transformation culminates when what previously appeared as morally possible to the agent now appears impossible, i.e. unconceived and unthinkable, moving through stages of transformation where some possibilities gradually disappear while others open up. While we show an example of moral transformation towards virtue, we allow that such transformation can occur in the opposite direction, hence we make claims about ‘character traits’ rather than virtues of vices. Through the example of former slave-trader Rodrigo’s transformation in the film The Mission, we follow the parallel development of new objects of value and ways of valuing (with respect to a group of indigenous people of South America) with the closing down of the possibility of disrespecting and harming them, to the end-point of transformation, where allowing their capture is for Rodrigo both unconceived and, when conceived, unthinkable.
Philosophies, 2023
How do we see the world aright? This question is central to Iris Murdoch’s philosophy as well as ... more How do we see the world aright? This question is central to Iris Murdoch’s philosophy as well as to that of her great source of inspiration, Simone Weil. For both of them, not only our action, but the very quality of our being depends on the ability to see things as they are, where vision is both a metaphor for immediate understanding and a literal expression of the requirement to train our perception so as to get rid of illusions. For both, too, the method to achieve this goal is attention. For both, finally, attention requires a dethronement of the self, considered as the source of illusion. In this paper I investigate what moral perception means for each of these philosophers and how it operates through attention and its relationship with the self. I will show that, despite many striking similarities, Murdoch’s project does not equal ‘Weil minus God’, but offers a different concept of the self, a different understanding of its removal, and therefore a different picture of attention and moral perception. In evaluating both views, I will gesture towards a third way represented by Zen Buddhism, which both philosophers variously consider but do not embrace.
The Murdochian Mind, 2022
Penultimate draft of the chapter on Attention in The Murdochian Mind, edited by Silvia Caprioglio... more Penultimate draft of the chapter on Attention in The Murdochian Mind, edited by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood (Routledge, forthcoming). Please quote the final published version.
European Journal of Philosophy, 2021
An important yet often unacknowledged aspect of moral discourse is the phenomenon of moral imposs... more An important yet often unacknowledged aspect of moral discourse is the phenomenon of moral impossibility, which challenges more widely accepted models of moral discussion and deliberation as choice among possible options. Starting from observations of the new possibilities of anti-immigrant attitudes and hate crimes which have been described by the press as something being 'unleashed', the paper asks what it means for something to enter or not the sphere of possibility in the moral sense, and whether it is ever desirable for something to remain or be pushed back outside the realm of the morally possible. Three forms of moral impossibility are identified: the unconceived, the unthinkable, and moral incapacity. Through the discussion of a stark fictional example of moral impossibility, the paper concludes that while the category of moral impossibility cannot settle disagreement, it sheds light on some of the most fundamental aspects of the moral life.
Journal of Animal Ethics, 2022
This paper engages with two fundamental attitudes towards the animals that are used for human con... more This paper engages with two fundamental attitudes towards the animals that are used for human consumption: attention and ironic detachment. Taken as two polarities that determine animal consumption, I discuss how these two attitudes are shaped or manifested during various en-counters with the animals in question. Starting from a striking photograph from the Lychee and Dog Meat Festival in China, I explore the embodiment of these attitudes in the “gaze” of human participants during the moment of encounter with animals that are going to be killed for food.
Journal of Value Inquiry, 2019
Among the possible ways of gaining moral knowledge, moral perception figures as a controversial y... more Among the possible ways of gaining moral knowledge, moral perception figures as a controversial yet fruitful option. If moral perception is possible, moral disagreement is addressed not by appealing to principles but to the process and the objects of perception, and moral progress occurs not through deliberation but by refining one's perceptual faculties. The possibility of "seeing clearly and justly" is at the heart of Iris Murdoch's thought, but Murdoch herself does not put forth a systematic argument for this view. In this paper I propose an argument for moral perception based on Murdoch's philosophy, while engaging with contemporary debates in moral perception. The key idea I take from Murdoch is that perception is conceptually laden, where concepts are understood as ways of grasping the world according to human concerns. Murdoch's position enables us to solve a difficult tension: explaining the motivating force of perception while maintaining objectivity in ethics. This view of moral perception also constitutes a radical position in the debate, where even the most optimistic defenses appeal to the supervenience of values on facts. If Murdoch is right, however, we perceive complex properties, including values, directly, so that appeal to supervenience becomes unnecessary and some of the grounds for the very distinction between fact and value are put into question.
Animals, 2020
In their daily practices, many ethical vegans choose what to eat, wear, and buy among a range of ... more In their daily practices, many ethical vegans choose what to eat, wear, and buy among a range of options that is limited to the exclusion of animal products: the idea of using such products is not ordinarily rejected, but does not occur as a possibility at all. In other cases, when confronted with the possibility of consuming animal products, vegans have claimed to reject it by saying that it would be impossible for them to do so. I refer to this overlooked phenomenon as 'moral impossibility'. An analysis of moral impossibility in animal ethics shows that it arises when one's very conception of 'what animals are' shifts: through encounter with other animals (physical presence) or when individuals learn in an engaged way about animals and what happens to them in production facilities (imaginative presence). This establishes a link between increased knowledge, understanding, and imaginative exploration on the one hand, and the exclusion, not of the choice, but of the very possibility of using animals as resources on the other. Taking seriously moral impossibility in veganism has two important consequences: one is that the debate around veganism needs to shift from choice and decision, toward an analysis of concepts and moral framing; the other is that moral psychology is no longer to be understood as empirical psychology plus ethical analysis, but the contents of psychological findings are themselves influenced and framed by moral reflection.
In: Panizza, S. and Wilson, P. Simone Weil: Venice Saved, Bloomsbury , 2019
Chapter on Weil's Venice Saved
Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, ed P. Rawling and P. Wilson, Routledge, 2018
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1953) is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of l... more Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1953) is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of language. He did not write extensively on translation, but this chapter shows how his insights can be applied to translation. Wittgenstein’s method, which takes pragmatic aspects of language to be of paramount importance, is discussed in relation to the ways in which translation can benefit. Four key concepts are discussed from Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical Investigations: language-games; forms of life; aspect-seeing; and the surveyable representation. Language-games, for example, are the different contexts in which we use language, with particular aims and rules which give the words their specific meaning. Instead of postulating a corresponding entity for each word, which the translator needs to find, a Wittgensteinian approach to translation suggests that we first need to understand which language-games texts are playing, and within what kinds of forms of life they fit. The task of translation is to recreate similar contexts and effects, rather than identifying an absolute referent. The chapter concludes with suggestions about how to evaluate different translations by appealing to Wittgenstein’s conception of language.
forthcoming in Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics (2022)
This paper takes up Axel Honneth's suggestion that we, in the 21 st century Western world, should... more This paper takes up Axel Honneth's suggestion that we, in the 21 st century Western world, should revisit the Marxian idea of reification; unlike Honneth, however, I will apply reification mainly to the ways in which humans relate to non-human animals. First, I summarise Honneth's concept of reification; then I explain why thinking about reification in relation to non-human animals is particularly important today; I end by suggesting that Iris Murdoch's idea of attention can help address the problem of reification, adding something important to Honneth's idea of recognition, and allowing us to consider reification from an ethical perspective.
This thesis explores the role of attention in morality as presented by Iris Murdoch.
Drafts by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Book Reviews by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
The Iris Murdoch Review, 2023
It cannot be easy to write about Simone Weil's life. First, writing about the life of a woman int... more It cannot be easy to write about Simone Weil's life. First, writing about the life of a woman intellectual as such can raise the doubt that one is sacrificing her output for an interest in her person, which is sadly often at the forefront when we talk about brilliant women. Richard Eyre's 2001 film about Iris Murdoch, where not enough of her novels and little of her philosophy shine through, is an example of such worry. Luckily, Robert Zaretsky's book on Weil is explicitly aimed at narrating, yes, her life, but 'in' her ideas, as the subtitle promises (although he starts the Introduction, regrettably, with the fact of Weil's death and starvation, something that has already generated way too much fascination). The ideas are meant to guide the story of her life, not vice versa, and that's why, as Zaretsky states, the chronology is not followed in strictly linear fashion, nor does the book have the ambition to be an exhaustive presentation of either Weil's life or her ideas.
Philosophical Investigations, 2023
Hands up if you sometimes feel that you would like to write philosophical papers about questions ... more Hands up if you sometimes feel that you would like to write philosophical papers about questions of fundamental importance in your experience, but can't. You may feel that the rules and expectations of the discipline prevent you from considering something of great significance but too big to be manageable even in a long book, or too universal for you to have something new to say about it or to not sound naïve, and so you end up creating arguments about some small point, arguments that are clear and precise, and not unhelpful, but you somehow lose your sense of meaningfulness. Or perhaps you feel that you would like to write personally about philosophical matters but realise that, as your tutor may have told you when you were a student, no one cares about what you think, only about what is true; where the tutor may not have considered the possibility that one could write in a personal way about something that is true.
Talks by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Iris Murdoch Conference: Literature and Philosophy in Dialogue, 2024
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Books by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
The Murdochian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full span of Murdoch's philosophical work, comprising 37 specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of leading scholars. Divided into five clear parts, the volume covers the following areas:
A guide to Murdoch's key philosophical texts, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
Core themes and concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, such as love, moral vision, and attention.
Murdoch's engagement with the history of philosophy, including Plato, Kant, Hegel, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein.
Interdisciplinary connections with art, literature, and religion, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
Murdoch and contemporary philosophical debates, including feminism, virtue ethics, and metaethics.
The application of Murdoch’s thought to applied ethics, including animal ethics, psychiatric ethics, and the environment.
Although recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in Murdoch’s philosophy, The Murdochian Mind is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. As such it will be of great interest to students of philosophy, especially ethics and aesthetics, as well as those in related disciplines such as literature, religion, and gender studies.
Papers by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Drafts by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Book Reviews by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
Talks by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza
The Murdochian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the full span of Murdoch's philosophical work, comprising 37 specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of leading scholars. Divided into five clear parts, the volume covers the following areas:
A guide to Murdoch's key philosophical texts, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.
Core themes and concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, such as love, moral vision, and attention.
Murdoch's engagement with the history of philosophy, including Plato, Kant, Hegel, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein.
Interdisciplinary connections with art, literature, and religion, including Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
Murdoch and contemporary philosophical debates, including feminism, virtue ethics, and metaethics.
The application of Murdoch’s thought to applied ethics, including animal ethics, psychiatric ethics, and the environment.
Although recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in Murdoch’s philosophy, The Murdochian Mind is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. As such it will be of great interest to students of philosophy, especially ethics and aesthetics, as well as those in related disciplines such as literature, religion, and gender studies.