Iris Murdoch

D.Phil dissertation 

Parts of Part 1. of this dissertation are developed in:
* "Contours and Barriers: What is it to Draw the Limits of Moral Language?"

Parts Part 2. of this dissertation are developed in two papers:
* "A Splitting 'Mind-Ache': An Anscombean Challenge to Kantian Self-Legislation" * "Self-Legislation and Other Figurative Dramas" .

General description:
Part 1. explains essential features of Cora Diamond’s philosophical methods, and explains what it takes to draw the limits of moral language--the language trough which moral reality is reflected. Based on that account I then argue that imaginative and figurative thinking--thinking grounded in metaphors and images--has an essential role in moral and religious understanding. Figurative language is not just a helpful guide to the understanding of some moral phenomena, but is  constitutive of them. In Part 2. I show this in the case of the Kantian idea of self-legislation and in Part 3. in the case of Anselm’s idea of God as reflected in his Ontological Proof.

Deriving from the myth of Narcissus, in which a beautiful youth falls in love with his own reflection, the concept of narcissism was given its first systematic treatment in Sigmund Freud's 1914 essay “On Narcissism.” Since Freud's account of narcissism remains the starting point for most subsequent discussions of the topic, this entry begins with a brief summary of Freud's views before moving on to consider some of the major questions that have consistently arisen in philosophical treatments of narcissism and self‐love. How ought we to draw the line between healthy self‐esteem and pathological narcissism? Given the apparently ubiquitous presence of “the dear self” (to use Kant's term) in human consciousness, what would it mean to cultivate a truly nonnarcissistic concern for others, and is such a thing possible – or even desirable?

Engaging with beauty can orient mind, heart and action in this era of ecological destruction. First, I present a vision of beauty that acknowledges some of its common critiques while salvaging it from claims that it is merely subjective, or worse, destructive. I then focus on how the ecological crisis elicits and invites participation in actions towards vulnerable things and the beauty they invoke. I reflect on my life experiences and engagements with art to help understand the possibilities and power in the beauty of vulnerable things and of actions towards them. While I acknowledge and address some difficulties with beauty as the basis for action, I suggest it is better suited to engage the ecological crisis than appealing to emotions such as hope or relying on prevalent ethical approaches. I end the paper by considering the transformative role aesthetics should play in reimagining subject focus, interdisciplinarity and character development in school curricula and pedagogy aimed at sustainability.

Iris Murdoch fait partie des philosophes qui, durant la deuxième partie du 20eime siècle, questionnèrent et critiquèrent la place du raisonnement en philosophie morale. Murdoch propose d'insister sur d'autres aspects de notre psychologie morale, qui sauront mettre en lumière notre sensibilité à ce qui est pertinent moralement, mais qui ne relève pas de notre raisonnement. Elle questionne aussi ces philosophies morales qui considèrent que ce qui compte moralement peut se réduire au choix et à l'action. Elle déplore cette approche qui laisse peu, ou pas, de place pour considérer la psychologie et le caractère de l'agent dans son entièreté et sa complexité. Murdoch propose plusieurs métaphores de vision pour montrer de quelle façon nous accumulons, d'une certaine façon, constamment une certaine forme de connaissance morale tout au long de nos vies éveillées. Nous voyons, percevons, recevons, nous sommes frappés par le flow continu de la vie et ceci n'est pas une mince affaire. D'ailleurs Murdoch suggère que bien souvent, au moment du choix, la décision est déjà prise et notre raisonnement y est pour bien peu dans le fait de diriger notre action. Son idée d'attention, ou d'attention morale, sera centrale pour comprendre son propos, puisqu'elle considère cette forme d'attention comme la bonne façon de voir le monde et de se disposer pour se rendre compte de ce qui importe moralement. Dans cette présentation, je vais principalement présenter ce qu'est l'attention morale pour Murdoch, sa pertinence et la place que cette notion tient dans le plus grand contexte de la psychologie morale d'aujourd'hui. Comme nous le verrons, l'attention morale de Murdoch a beaucoup influencé les recherches faites sur la perception morale et en éthique du Care.

Adapted for the screen by Sir Richard and Charles Wood and directed by Sir Richard Eyre,  Iris tells the life story of famous British philosopher and novelist, Iris Murdoch. Her husband, John Bayley writes two books entitled Iris: A Memoir and Elegy for Iris with reference to the health problems, Murdoch has towards the end of her life.  Relying on these two books, the movie Iris came out in 2001, three years after Murdoch’s death. In the movie, it is shown how Iris suffers from loss of brain power and Alzheimer as she gets older and how this situation gives pain both to her and her husband, Bayley.  Hence,  in this study, how lives of elderly and their loved ones change after illnesses and their pain will be analyzed in reference to Iris Murdoch’s real life story as it is depicted in the movie, Iris.

Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular.

REVIEWS
“This fascinating book offers a valuable explication of Murdoch's relentless attempts to reveal what is missing in contemporary moral philosophy and culture. Greatly influenced by Kierkgaard, Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil, the complexity and messiness of ordinary life, and with one's deepest commitments-many of which cannot be accessed, or altered by means of arguments intended to defend philosophical "positions." Forsberg (Univ. of Uppsala, Sweden) makes excellent use of the work of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall, who show how one might avoid the tendency of philosophers toward "deflection" from the "difficulties of reality." These are difficulties that people have when language fails in the face of experiences that refuse reduction to the abstraction of the clearly defined concepts sought after in philosophy--what Murdoch called its "dryness." Novelists like what it is like to struggle with the deeply confusing, distressing issues of the present without stepping aside from the emotional intensity of the encounters. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--”
(S.A. Mason, Concordia University, Choice)

“A fair bang in the philosophy of literature ... Forsberg's addition to this scene is brilliant and necessary ... This [book] will reverberate.” 
(British Journal of Aesthetics)

“This is one of the most philosophically sophisticated contributions to these interlinked issues that I have come across in the last decade; the care, charity and ease with which Forsberg contests and dismantles one of the most influential current readings of Murdoch (that advanced by Nussbaum) is enough on its own to make it clear that standards in this area have just been raised.” 
(Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford, UK)

“Can we lose our moral concepts? Can our culture and our understanding of the human occlude the background that alone makes sense of the ideals we want to live by? Niklas Forsberg argues that this is a basic insight of Iris Murdoch's philosophy. Moreover, this gives us the key to understanding the relation of Murdoch's philosophical writings to her novels. The latter hold a mirror to our lives, in which we could potentially become aware of this loss. This book is full of philosophical insight, not only about contemporary moral thinking but also about the relation of literature to philosophical thought.” 
(Charles Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, McGill University, Canada)

In this paper I examine the relation between intentional action and morality from the perspective of practical epistemology. In other words I study the relation between knowledge of one’s own intentional actions (knowledge in action) and knowledge of what is good to do or what one ought to do in particular circumstances (knowledge in the circumstances).  If practical knowledge in the former sense (knowledge in action) and practical knowledge in the latter sense (knowledge in the circumstances) turn out to constitute exercises of one and the same capacity for knowledge, as I will argue they do, this will give us strong reason to believe that what is known in the two cases (i.e. intentional action and the moral fabric of the world) is in some sense the same.

In examining the relation between practical knowledge of one’s own intentional actions and practical knowledge of what is good to do I draw from two traditions of thought on practical epistemology.  The first is the tradition of Anscombe’s conception of knowledge in action and the second is the tradition of Murdoch’s conception of knowledge in the circumstances.  What is striking about these traditions is that they tend to understand practical knowledge by reference to the possible involvement therein of perception.  Thus Anscombe claims in her Intention[1] that knowledge in action is specified as knowledge without observation; a claim to the effect that the epistemological status of knowledge in action is determined by reference to the lack of a certain sort of involvement therein of perception.  And Iris Murdoch in her Sovereignty of the Good[2] proposes that what makes knowledge in the circumstances knowledge is a form of sensitivity to particular features or aspects of the circumstances in which the agent finds herself.  Thus, for Murdoch, knowledge in the circumstances owes its status as knowledge to the capacity of the agent to perceive what she ought to do in particular circumstances.

In this paper I will argue that both of these forms of knowledge are instances of the exercise of one and the same capacity for knowledge.  But the question now arises.  How can we both claim that the two forms of practical knowledge are instances of the exercise of one and the same capacity for knowledge and that perception plays such a diverse role in their epistemological grounding?  In the main body of this paper I will show how to interpret the Murdochian and the Anscombean claims so as to provide the materials with which we can answer this question.  If the argument of this paper works, it will transpire that both of these forms of knowledge are instances of the exercise of our capacity for self-knowledge.  This account of practical knowledge opens the way for understanding intentional action and the moral fabric of the world as knowable as the self.  And it is thus that what is known in the two forms of knowing (i.e. intentional action and the moral fabric of the world) is in some sense the same.
[1] Anscombe, 1957.
[2] Murdoch, 1970.

This article asks what it means to be a ‘serious philosopher’. This question rises from recent works on Iris Murdoch, which express their joy in the fact that Murdoch is now taken to be a serious philosopher. Through a discussion of Murdoch’s famous example of a mother-in-law M and her daughter-in-law D, I argue that ‘serious’ can imply (dis)approval of implicit practices or expectations. I then use Sabina Lovibond’s Iris Murdoch, Gender and Philosophy (2011) to argue that implicit practices and expectations in philosophy have prevented Murdoch from being taken seriously as a philosopher and have even hindered her in taking herself seriously.

In this paper, I lay Iris Murdoch's account of love as just attention alongside Aristotle's account of friendship, particularly his claim that to a flourishing life, friendship is necessary. Both accounts are mutually illuminating, I argue, since both highlight important aspects of what it takes to make moral progress.

A merge reflection of humanism, liberalism and existentialism is overflowing in the novels of Irish-born Booker Prizewinner British author, philosopher, novelist, Dame Jean Irish Murdoch, which is still a mere appetite for social sustenance. She was a humanistic by spirit but apparently she knows the ruling power of suppressed Individuality & severity of real world over humanity., She looks at human behavior not only through the eyes of the writer, but through the person doing the behaving which connects her to their inner feelings and self concept of human nature and their behavior and conditions. This paper reveals Murdoch's revolt against the conventional social hierarchy system, gender discrimination, prejudicial conduct, wide-ranging social pre-assumptions and misconception about the real self-determination with the help of her thought provoking novel " The Bell ". Her fiction shows the modern changes of society such as changes of the science of the human psychology and their revolutionized modern phenomenon like sexuality, homosexuality and other rising social issues like women empowerments, major distinction among bigotry, superstition, religion and spiritual aspirations which leads a path towards true liberalism and empowerment of not only the individuals but also to human society. This paper clearly confirms her favor to humanism, liberalism, and immortal declaration and its hardcore need for human society.

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.

In a post-war panorama of secular humanism, morality has taken on new contours that allow Goodness to be achieved via the forgoing of the Self. This seems to be the lesson of the late Iris Murdoch, who dedicated her life to the study of philosophy in an attempt to create a unified moral code to offer guidance to (wo)mankind. Increasingly worried by the ethical road society was travelling down in the twentieth century, its lack of religious direction and consequent spiritual void, the novelist creates a moral philosophy based on the precept that one must reject one’s natural predisposition for egotism - a form of Evil. The soul must enter a path of knowledge that will allow man to see Reality and Truth. The secular redemption of the soul can only be achieved through a life dedicated to art and looking beyond oneself. Female Gothic, a tangential strain that developed out of the eighteenth century Gothic, has been used to express social anxieties concerning such issues as identity, sexuality, the fragmentation of the self and the redemption or damnation of the soul. This article explores how Iris Murdoch appropriates Female Gothic in order to explore these anxieties, as well as to propagate her own moral philosophy in an attempt to reform our spiritual world through a suggested model of Goodness.

Of the many forgiveness-related questions that she takes up in her novels, the one with which Iris Murdoch wrestles most often is the question, ‘Is forgiveness possible without God?’ The aim of this paper is to show, in the first instance, why the question Murdoch persistently raises is a question worth asking. Alongside this primary aim stands a secondary one, which is to consider how one might glean moral insights from the Christian tradition even if one does not (any longer) endorse its theological commitments.

From Jackson Pollock's gestural abstraction to Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting with a brush tied to his dysfunctional hand, certain artistic gestures acquire fixed meanings. This paper investigates the role of imitated artistic experience as part of the specific expression of the age in the recontextualisation of the Renaissance discourse in a particular British postmodern narrative: Iris Murdoch's third novel The Sandcastle (1957). Based on the combination of post-structuralist and deconstructionist approaches, the study aims to demonstrate the ambivalence of the authority of the Renaissance narrative of artistic rebirth as Jean-François Lyotard's grand narrative. This paper argues that the ekphrastic revival of Giotto's 'perfect circle' and the set of aesthetic values and ideas underlying the works of Giotto as the father of the Renaissance narrative that are associated with this gesture reveals the postmodern features of Giotto's anecdote and postulates it as a small narrative of subversiveness of the canon. The anecdotal origin of Giotto's gesture, the validity of which is based on Giorgio Vasari's documentation of the Old Master's biography in his Lives, establishes and simultaneously undermines the influential power of ekphrastic knowledge. Its conceptualisation of a paradigm that contributes to the formation of an artist is considered within the framework of Michel Foucault's terminology as the conceptualisation of an 'ideology of the return'. Imitation in representation is approached in this paper as Giotto's key artistic principle that is reassessed in The Sandcastle in its connection to the failure of Murdoch's protagonist to fit contemporary reality into the familiar aesthetic systems. Already during his lifetime, the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337) acquired the fame and reputation of an artist who revived painting that had supposedly fallen into decay during the Middle Ages. One of Giotto's contemporaries, the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani (1276-1348), envisaged him to be "the most sovereign master of painting in his time" (qtd. in Galdy 54); the Italian writer and poet Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) claimed in his Decameron (1353) that Giotto "brought that art again to light, which had lain buried for many ages" (304), whereas the pre-eminent Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) immortalised his image of an artistic innovator in his major work The Divine Comedy (121). However, it was in the sixteenth century, two centuries after Giotto's life and death, when his name was contextualised by the Italian artist and historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) within the discussion of the artistic rebirth that acquired the name of 'Renaissance' in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550).

The interactive fields of philosophy of psychiatry, philosophy of mind and psychiatric ethics have proved excellent frameworks in which to examine conceptual changes in our understanding of the human being during the last two centuries. Comparatively little has been written in the field of moral philosophy about these insights into the nature of moral agency, subjectivity and other fundamental concepts that enrich our understanding of mental health. The aim of this chapter is to develop Iris Murdoch’s work on moral perception in this novel direction. In doing so, it speaks to recent philosophical and empirical work on therapeutic understanding through literary expressions and illness biographies, which I use to explain why narrative self-creation is central to the recovery process. My new argument of narrative understanding in psychiatry explores the wider implications of relational moral agency for psychiatric ethics. This deliberate move away from an overly individualistic conception of the moral self to an intersubjective one creates opportunities for self-cultivation in concept application and the normative grounding of concepts.

Recent philosophical discussions about love often focus on reasons to love a particular person. Some philosophers argue that we do not have reasons to love (Frankfurt 2009; Smuts 2013; Zangwill 2013), but rather that our love for that particular person gives us reasons. Harry Frankfurt argues that what we love is important to us just because we love it. Others argue that we do have reasons to love the particular people we love, but disagree on what these reasons consist in. For example, the reason for love is the properties of the object of our love (Abrahamson and Leite 2011; Jollimore 2011; Keller 2000), such as being funny, or having beautiful eyes, or our relationship with this person (Kolodny 2003). In these recent discussions philosophers of love seem to primarily focus on 'reasons to love person X'. But what about 'reasons to love, period'? Focusing on why we love and what love is in general, enables us to look at what we find meaningful in love, instead of what we find valuable in the beloved. Focusing on the lover instead of the beloved could improve the way we love in general, improving our relationships with all those particular X's. Focusing on the loving agent could help answer questions such as: 'what does it mean to love?' and 'how can we love better?'. Apart from describing what love is, one could independently argue about what kind of love would be more or less valuable. We could categorize better and worse forms of love. In this chapter this normative dimension of the concept 'love' is considered. Such a project is not trying to formulate the description of 'love', but is focusing on what would be better or worse forms of loving. Furthermore, this chapter is what Sally Haslanger has called an 'ameliorative' project (Haslanger 2012). Such a project involves trying to formulate a concept that best suits the point of having such a term. What is the purpose of talking about love? An ameliorative project requires actively making decisions about what to mean when using it. How can we change the world around us for the better and improve how we use the concept 'love'? In this sense, ameliorative projects can be important for social progress. What use of the word 'love' could improve the way we love and how could it impact society? 'All about love' by bell hooks is such an ameliorative project about love. Using personal anecdotes, psychological and philosophical ideas, she criticizes the way in which 'love' is used in today's societywhich is, according to her, 'without much meaning', for example when referring to how much we like our favorite food, color or sportsand instead argues that if we all came to the agreement that 'love' is a verb rather than a noun, then we would all be happier (hooks 2001, p. 4). hooks believes love is more of an interactive process, and clarifies why society needs to adopt this use of the word love. What should this particular 'verb' consist in? In line with hooks I argue that we would all love better if we think of love as a verb: love as an activity of attending to one another. Love as an ongoing practice, a process. I turn to two famous contemporary analytic philosophers, who have argued for different but related accounts of love. By comparing David Velleman's and Iris Murdoch's account of love I argue that Velleman's account is not suitable for the ameliorative project while Murdoch's account enables us to be better lovers. I argue that better love consists of an activity of loving, instead of a passive evaluation. While love can be understood in many ways, at least one aspect of it is captured in the slogan: 'love' is a verb. This slogan captures the idea that loving is an activity and furthermore a specific activity: loving means engaging in an ongoing practice of loving attention, a process that requires continuous work. I will argue that Murdochian love is not only valuable for philosophers or people who are concerned with being morally good-which is Murdoch's focusand that Murdochian love is particularly valuable to ordinary lovers, to people who want meaningful loving relationships. 2. Love, Value and Looking In 'Love as a Moral Emotion', Velleman attempts to assemble elements of both Murdoch and Kant into an account of love as a moral emotion (Velleman 1999). This famous contemporary account of love is meant to address and combat Frankfurt's position: love is not a response to reasons but is in fact the basis of all reasons. On Frankfurt's account, the lover cares for the beloved, desires their well-being, and, in doing so, comes to confer value upon the beloved. Against this bestowal view of love, Velleman argues for the appraisal view of love inspired by Iris Murdoch. Murdoch, Kant and Velleman all allow that value may be discerned or figuratively seen, as Tony Milligan has observed in his analysis of Velleman's use of Murdoch's account of love (2013, p. 113). Velleman adopts Murdoch's idea that this value may be seen by 'really looking' (Velleman 1999, p. 343). Murdoch's account of love and Kant's account of respect are taken by Velleman to be complementary ways in which we recognize the inherent value of persons. Velleman takes different features from both philosopher's work, and is not alone in placing Murdoch's ideas within a Kantian perspective. 1 Velleman, being a Kantian, argues that our value, our dignity as persons, consists in our rational nature. One important way in which we exercise our rational nature is to respond with respect to the dignity of other persons. We are aware of the incomparable value in a person as a rational being and this awareness arrests our motives of self-interest, and thereby prevents us from treating him as a means to our ends. This is what Velleman (and Kantians in general) call respect. Velleman argues that love is similarly a response to the dignity of persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object that justifies love. Velleman suggests that love, like respect, is an appreciation for the capacity to be "actuated by reasons" (p. 365), which means a capacity for "appreciating the value of ends, including self-existent ends such as persons". Velleman argues: "I find it plausible to say that what we respond to, in loving people, is their capacity to love" (p. 365). For Velleman, love and respect are responses to the same value, but they are different kinds of responses. Love arrests not our self-love, like respect does, but rather our emotional self-protection. Love disarms our emotional defenses, making us vulnerable, by responding to someone's dignity (p. 361). Velleman claims that: Many of our defenses against being emotionally affected by another person are ways of not seeing what is most affecting about him. This contrived blindness to the other person is among the defenses that are lifted by love, with the result that we really look at him, perhaps for the first time, and respond emotionally in a way that's indicative of having really seen him. (1999, p. 361). There is a clear parallel with Murdoch here. Velleman's view of love as arresting our selfprotective egocentricity helps to explain why love is an exercise in really looking, precisely as Murdoch claims. Velleman describes someone having "stopped loving his wife" as having "stopped really looking or listening" (p. 373). His account is clearly inspired by Murdoch, who claims that to love is to redirect our attention outside ourselves, to learn to perceive the 1 Although Murdoch regarded herself a Platonist, many philosophers have argued that her ideas are compatible with Kantian ideas, or have used her ideas within Kantian perspectives (cf.

Quante e quali sono le forme dell'amore? L'amore è un'emozione pericolosa o la strada maestra verso il bene? Il suo sostrato sono i sensi o la volontà? A partire da Platone, queste e molte altre domande hanno attratto a fasi alterne l'attenzione dei filosofi nel loro interrogarsi sulle componenti fondamentali della moralità 1 . Una considerazione comune a tutti i pensatori che si sono accostati con profondità al tema dell'amore è che in esso siano distinguibili due componenti. Vi è infatti innanzi tutto un carattere "passivo", di puro "accadimento" dell'amore, in forza del quale esso avviene come un trasporto sul quale l'agente non ha potere di controllo, e in secondo luogo un momento maggiormente "attivo", che potremmo chiamare di "assenso all'essere dell'amato" 2 . Se il primo momento ha il suo culmine nell'avere, il secondo termina piuttosto nel donare. Ma entrambe le componenti, per quanto distinte, si radicano nell'amore come primo atto del volere, come principio e termine dell'azione umana 3 . Ed è nella loro fenomenologia e nelle loro possibili distorsioni che risiede l'importanza fondamentale che rivestono per la moralità, fino al punto di far dire ad Agostino che la virtù altro non è che ordo amoris 4 . Tra i pensatori contemporanei, uno spazio significativo alla riflessione su questi temi è stato dedicato da una pensatrice che li ha approcciati con grande profondità, Iris Murdoch. La romanziera e filosofa britannica, infatti, ha dedicato all'amore pagine memorabili, facendone, all'interno del suo pensiero, insieme alla bellezza e all'arte, una delle vie privilegiate di rottura del velo egoistico e di accettazione della alterità della realtà e quindi, nel suo linguaggio, di strada al Bene. Nel recupero di questo ruolo forte dell'amore, inteso non come mera emozione ineducata ma come virtù, 1 Per una interessante trattazione del tema dell'amore come virtù nella storia del pensiero occidentale, si veda ad esempio il fondamentale anche se non recente lavoro di J. PIEPER, Sull'amore, Morcelliana, Brescia 1974. 2 Cfr. J. PIEPER, op. cit., pp. 31-33. 3 Cfr. TOMMASO D'AQUINO, ST I, q. 20 art. 1. 4 AGOSTINO, De civitate Dei 15,22. 1 Murdoch si pone alla scuola tanto di Platone quanto di una pensatrice da lei ammirata e nei confronti della quale riconosce un debito ingente: Simone Weil. Virtù e amore in Iris Murdoch Per comprendere il ruolo dell'amore all'interno del pensiero di Murdoch occorre ripercorrere brevemente le tappe del suo pensiero, così come emergono nel fondamentale scritto La sovranità del Bene. Nella concezione murdochiana -che tenta di ripristinare l'oggettivismo etico ricorrendo all'idea del Bene come polo di attrazione della coscienza, e promuove pertanto una singolare forma di realismo morale -proprio perché esistono fatti morali da guardare, la vita morale non ha a che fare in primo luogo con la scelta di una volontà cieca, ma, platonicamente, con la visione. Il miglioramento morale passa attraverso un cammino, un pellegrinaggio, costituito dal movimento della coscienza verso la perfezione; pellegrinaggio di cui la visione morale è tanto punto di partenza quanto di arrivo. Tale visione morale non va però intesa in maniera meramente intellettualistica, bensì come sinergia di conoscenza, volontà e amore, sinergia pazientemente ricercata e coltivata in un lungo arco di tempo, e che può avvenire solo come risultato di una libera scelta del soggetto, che ne porta la responsabilità morale. Per questa ragione, la virtù, nel linguaggio di Murdoch, consiste nella capacità di prestare attenzione alla realtà, ovvero di «squarciare il velo della coscienza egoistica per congiungersi al mondo come esso realmente è» 5 : La direzione dell'attenzione, contrariamente all'istinto, è rivolta all'esterno, lontano dall'io che riduce tutto ad una falsa unità, verso la grande, sorprendente varietà del mondo 6 . impedirci di vedere un filo d'erba così come un'altra persona. Una crescente consapevolezza di ciò che è bene e il tentativo [di solito solo parzialmente riuscito] di attenervisi in modo puro, senza intromissione dell'io, porta con sé una crescente consapevolezza dell'unità e interdipendenza del mondo morale. Un'intelligenza che ha un unico scopo è l'immagine della "fede". Pensiamo a cosa significa far crescere in qualcuno la comprensione per una grande opera d'arte 7 . Come si può sconfiggere l'ego con le sue pretese, rompendo il velo della fantasia? L'amore vero è, per Murdoch, uno dei modi più comuni attraverso cui si può imparare a trascendere se stessi diventando recettivi nei confronti della realtà esterna 8 . La tematica del ruolo dell'amore, inteso anche come attrattiva sessuale, è mutuata da Murdoch dalla lettura di Platone, specie del Simposio e del Fedro. In quest'ultimo dialogo, com'è noto 9 , l'amore è descritto come sorgente cruciale di motivazione per l'anima in cerca della bellezza e del Bene, oltre che come fonte di visione, tanto della persona amata quanto del Bene stesso. Nell'amore del miglior tipo, gli amanti si riconoscono reciprocamente come agenti, rispettando e cercando di promuovere ed incentivare l'uno la libertà dell'altro. Murdoch è altamente debitrice di queste tesi 10 , in base alle quali l'amore vero trasforma, perché libera l'individuo dai legami dannosi dell'io e lo avvicina alla forma del Bene: Eros è il desiderio del bene e della gioia che è attivo nell'anima a tutti i livelli e attraverso il quale siamo in grado di volgerci verso la realtà. Questa è la forza fondamentale che può liberare i prigionieri e sospingerli verso le più alte soddisfazioni della luce e della libertà. […] Eros è una forma del desiderio d'immortalità, del perpetuo possesso del bene, qualunque sia per noi il bene. […] Il desiderio dev'essere purificato a ogni livello. […] L'amore carnale insegna che quel che vogliamo è sempre "al di là", e ci infonde un'energia che può essere trasformata in virtù creativa 11 .

This article explores intriguing resonances in the work of Michael Polanyi and Iris Murdoch, touching on ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology, as well as Murdoch's literary output. In so doing, it begins to outline a phenomenological approach to Platonist virtue ethics informed by Murdoch's work and drawing heavily on Polanyi's post-critical episte-mology; it also gestures toward how such an approach might be applied in the classroom.

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch's masterpiece, 'The Sea, The Sea' won 'The Booker Prize' in 1978 in which writer attempts to divulge real and natural portrayal of the contemporary society, characters, plot and climax as she wants readers to experience harsh truth and naked reality of practical and normal life instead of portrayal of idealism, impracticality, romanticism, imaginary and fantasies of made-up life. The Sea, The Sea is Murdoch's of the finest attempt to root out odd imaginary and to insert what is real and true. This paper reveals that acknowledging truth and accepting reality is the one and only way to know one's real self which helps one to be moral and good.

The present essay first presents an overview of Tolstoy’s normative expressivist philosophical aesthetics, narrowly construed; then the view is widened to include the moral-political framework within which proper artworks should fulfill their vital function. It concludes with some brief remarks on the influence of Tolstoy’s ideas on later thinkers.

In what follows, I will focus primarily upon Iris Murdoch's philosophical texts and more occasionally draw from her novels. Section one will set out the marginalisation of contentment within the former and argue that Murdoch has the aspiration to place a commitment to contentment within her philosophical ethic but little scope to do so. Section two will suggest that this problem results, at least in part, from her conception of unselfing as a distinctive mode of suffering and not as a comprehensive way out of suffering. Section three will argue that making sense of unselfing in this way has a number of advantages. It is, for example, a corrective to any overemphasis upon Murdoch’s proximity to Buddhism and it rules out any conception of unselfing as an exercise in escaping from familiar forms of human vulnerability. The concluding section will set out the way in which unselfing, understood as a mode of suffering that does not exclude a concern for contentment, allows us to give content to the concept of moral courage. (A virtue of some relevance to our times.)

This book provides a concise and highly readable reassessment of Iris Murdoch's engagement with philosophy throughout her life and proposes that she was, most importantly, a philosophical novelist. By investigating her use of philosophical argument in her fictional writing, it becomes clear that her narratives always depend upon a strong metaphysical underpinning. Leeson proceeds thematically through the philosophical phases of Murdoch's life and develops a clear argument that Murdoch reacts against the philosophies of Sartre, Plato, Nietzsche and Heidegger not only in her philosophical writings but also in her fiction. Indeed, it is in her fiction that her philosophical argument is most persuasive and accessible. This timely study provides new information regarding Murdoch's engagement with Martin Heidegger and also provides a detailed critique of critics who have overlooked Murdoch's engagement with philosophy within her fiction.

Review
"It is a sign of health in a scholarly community when books arise that challenge its orthodoxies. Such challenge requires bravery of the scholar and meticulous care in arguing for new approaches. Leeson's book is brave and healthy in this way, aiming to open new lines of research and inquiry into Iris Murdoch 's novels as, precisely, philosophical novels. Not novels in which philosophy is a motif (the orthodoxy), but in which philosophy is, in fact, done. Recent gestures by other scholars in Murdoch Studies indicate that such a line of counter-criticism has been opened, notably by the work of Bran Nicols and Guy Backus, though not settled. Leeson's book extends that line to firmly establish that Murdoch's novels do philosophy, and to open space for explorations of the depth to which her philosophy is woven into her aesthetic fabric... There is much inspiration to be found here, and Leeson has established himself as young scholar of both depth and promise." -M. F. Simone Roberts, author of Irish Murdoch and the Moral Imagination: Essays (McFarland & Co Inc, 2010)

This is not a paper, but a collection of quotes from the work of Iris Murdoch. They form the basis of my essay on "Iris Murdoch and the Demon-Ridden Pilgrimage of Human Life", and I thought others who are working on Murdoch may appreciate the collection as a useful resource.

I argue that the idea of virtue has become central after the Fifties in both Anglo-Saxon and German moral philosophy  and that this revival has come together with recognition of the legitimacy of discussion of issues in normative ethics, something that philosophers both on the Continent and in the Anglo-Saxon world used to overlook in the first half of the twentieth-century. I point at examples such as Stuart Hampshire and Elizabeth Anscombe as proof of the centrality of virtue ethics in the first phase of the normative turn. I also argue that, far from being a radical alternative to ‘modern moral philosophy’ as its proponents believe, virtue ethics is precisely moral argument of the kind both Kantian ethics at its best and less dogmatic versions of utilitarianism have brought to the fore of philosophical discussion.

The Sovereignty of Good is a short volume (106 pages in its first, 1970, edition) composed of three previously separately published essays on moral philosophy by the British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. One of its many appeals is that it is not like the typical (grey-soberly analytical) British philosophy text. This can be said not only regarding Murdoch's lively style of writing but also concerning the content of her ideas. Murdoch's book is a reaction against the predominant Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy of her time. Against the continuous efforts of the latter for making moral affairs either a nonsense or an emotional-subjective matter, Murdoch offers the peculiar Platonist approach of stating Good as the objective aim of the virtuous (unselfish and loving) person's attention. The first of the three essays, "The Idea of Perfection," offers a critical approach to several analytical philosophers such as G. E. Moore, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Ayer, Hare, and Stuart Hampshire and their-at the time-influential moral philosophy. The outcome of this analytical moral philosophy was its sharp division between fact and value, and the belief that while the former is the proper object of knowledge, the latter lack of any cognitive content-a picture of a world deprived of intrinsic value, a neutral realm of pure facts. The moral agent in such a world is the "free" (abstract, unconditioned, autonomous) will, a will of choosing. It is highly significant, as Murdoch suggests, that this picture of the world and the moral subject is also typical of the most famous continental philosophy at the time, existentialism. Murdoch situates herself in the crossroads of these quite the opposite trends in contemporary philosophy and shows that they share more than it could appear at first glance. Against this "Kantian" (liberal) picture of human moral agency, Murdoch rightfully argues that we perform moral actions, not because an empty unconditioned will, but because we see the objective moral value in the world, i.e. values that do not depend on our will, nor are the outcome of our choosing. Those, she believes, are objective features that we must learn to spot in the object by attending to it without the distorting clouds of our selfish nature. To illustrate this, she uses her most famous example of "M and D," a hypothetical "ordinary and everyday" situation of moral evaluation from a woman (M) towards her daughter-in-law (D). (It is curious that here Murdoch retains the pedantic analytical style of using symbols for no reason at all in her intent to argue against this very tradition, perhaps in an attempt to not appear as a complete outsider). Our evaluation of an object is true when we see it how it really is through a just, loving and unselfish attention toward it. Insofar as there is no general formula for each moral situation, we should develop a sensibility to feel the "magnetic pull" of the perfectness of things in order to see them as they really are. Thus, love is knowledge of the individual object in its perfection. This is a move directed against the dominant moral philosophy of her time, not only for its cognitive approach to morality but also for rescuing the commonly neglected concept of love. In the second essay, "On 'God' and 'Good'," Murdoch struggles between two one-sided opposite trends in contemporary philosophy: the "romantic" humanism (existentialism) that simply proclaims that we are free, and the "scientific" (reductionist) empiricism that make of man just another object of nature captive in its iron cause-effect chain. She is not satisfied with either of these views, although she makes a significant concession to the latter when she accepts a "realistic" picture of human nature following the "quasi-mechanical" Freudian description of our psyche. The Hobbesian notion of homo homini lupus seems to dominate her view on this. Murdoch openly declares that, for her, human beings are naturally selfish. She does not take this assumption to its final implications, but it follows from this that all her positive views on how we should be, stand against our supposed nature as human beings. So, why we should fight our nature, why selfishness-our true nature-should not be admitted as goodness? Murdoch does not address this contradiction nor put in question the Freudian picture of the self either. She naively identifies a socio-historical conditioned mode of behaviour with an abstract (shared by all separate individuals) human nature.

ריבונות הטוב, שראה אור ב-1970, הוא מעט המחזיק את המרובה: חיבור דק גזרה, המציג את משנתה של מרדוק באופן תמציתי באמצעות שלושה מאמרים נפרדים שקובצו יחדיו. הספר נחשב לאחד הטקסטים המקוריים שהעמידה המחשבה המוסרית במחצית השנייה של המאה העשרים, ונדמה כי איכויותיו רק הולכות ומתבהרות בחלוף השנים. תרומתו הגדולה היא בהשבת האידיאה של "הטוב" לסדר היום האתי, כנגד נטייתה של הפילוסופיה המודרנית להתעלם ממושג זה או להמעיט מחשיבותו לדיון על מהות המוסריות. אף שהנוף האינטלקטואלי עבר שינויים משמעותיים מאז פרסום הספר, השאלות שמעלה ריבונות הטוב והתשובות שהוא מציע לא איבדו מאומה מחריפותן.

הספר תורגם בידי ד"ר יואב אשכנזי, שגם הקדים לו מבוא רחב יריעה, הסוקר את פועלה של מרדוק ואת השקפותיה.

The philosophical work of Iris Murdoch, although not so extensive, cannot be easily grasped through usual classifications. Here we suggest approaching it from the perspective of Moore’s thesis on the indefinable nature of good that she endorsed after having re-examined it. This comparison with Moore, however, is part of a more general and deeper investigation on the platonic Idea of the Good itself. Thus, after having analyzed how Murdoch understood and assessed the transition from Moore’s conception to the contemporary framework shared by emotivism and R. Hare’s prescriptivism, we clarify the idea of the sovereignty of good by emphasizing the following three aspects: the link between the realm of good and the authority of truth; the unifying power of the idea of good, in regard to reality as we experience it in our lives; lastly, the way in which this idea enables us to transcend the limits of our inherited theoretical horizons, thus revealing the true nature of human freedom

Iris Murdoch’s interpreters have often tried to read her as putting forward an alternative form of ethical foundationalism. On this reading, Murdoch is taken to be proposing “loving attention” or “the Good” as a fundamental ethical principle that would play the same role as the principle of utility or
the categorical imperative. Here, I argue that a careful reading of chapter 17 of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals makes any foundationalist reading of Murdoch untenable. Murdoch, I argue, is better understood as a descriptivist. Her aim, as she puts it, is not to tell us what our moral concepts must be, but simply to describe what they are. Through close attention to the central metaphor of the “field of force” and a consideration of Murdoch’s philosophical methodology, I seek to clarify the goals of Murdoch’s descriptivist project and its moral and philosophical significance.

Монография посвящена исторической поэтике жанра метаромана, установлению его единой смысловой основы и границ варьирования его структуры в разные эпохи его бытования. История метаромана как жанра выстраивается начиная с его генезиса в античном романе с авторскими вторжениями и формирования собственно метаромана на исходе эйдетической эпохи поэтики (в «Дон Кихоте» Сервантеса) до расцвета жанра в эпоху художественной модальности, особенно в XX в. Выявляются этапы формирования и развития жанра, метароман отграничивается от близких явлений – романа с авторскими вторжениями и кюнстлерромана, а также прослеживается, каким образом они взаимодействовали на протяжении веков. Обозначаются границы варьирования жанра в разные эпохи его бытования, прослеживается тяготение разных национальных литератур к определенным разновидностям жанра, демонстрируется сущность наиболее характерных черт метаромана в эволюционном аспекте.

Much contemporary] moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance, or as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in [The Sovereignty of Good], as the privileged focus of attention or will. This philosophy has accredited a cramped and truncated view of morality in a narrow sense, as well as of the whole range of issues involved in the attempt to live the best possible life, and this not only among professional philosophers, but with a wider public. So much of my effort…will be directed towards enlarging our range of legitimate moral descriptions, and in some cases retrieving modes of thought and description which have misguidedly been made to seem problematic.

Iris Murdoch, the English philosopher and writer, and Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher and psychoanalyst, tried to depict the human relations in a questioning way in the twentieth century. In this respect, their ideas frequently meet on the fields such as philosophy and psychoanalysis. This paper will handle Murdoch's well-known novel The Sea The Sea in terms of its protagonist's, Charles Arrowby's unconscious motivations in connection with his obsessive love for Hartley. When Charles's sexual and emotional relationships, such as his relationship with Clement who is old enough to be his mother, his obsession for his first love who is married to another man, his will to steal women from their husbands, and his references to his strict mother are considered, he seems more as a representative of Lacanian subject of the unconscious.

In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch's views remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously described as " central " to moral philosophy – i.e. love. In this paper, I argue that the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch's work, but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate Murdoch's account of love to neo-Aristotelian or neo-Kantian theories of moral agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here, I present a reading of Murdoch's account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch famously described as " the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real ". When properly understood, Murdoch's account of love opens up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in contemporary moral theory.

במאי טלוויזיה מפורסם מחבל שוב ושוב בסיכויו לאהוב ולהית מאושר, מחריב את חייהם של הקרובים אליו, ומוביל את בנה המתבגר של אהבת נעוריו אל מותו בטביעה. מפקח מס ויוצר כושל מפתה את עצמו להתאהב באשתו הבוגדת ובבתו בת השמונה-עשרה של חברו, הסופר המפורסם, מוביל את חייו אל עברי פי פחת, אל תא הכלא ואל ההודעה ברצח של ביצע. תמות אלה ודומות טורדות את הסופרת והפילוסופית אייריס מרדוק, מהדהדות ברומנים הרבים מפרי עטה ובכתיבתה הפילוסופית. ספר זה מורדש להצגת יצירתה של מרדוק, המתמקדת בשאלת היחס האנושי לאחרים ולעולם. באמצעות המסורת - שראשיתה בהגותם של קאנט ושל הגל, ושורשיה ברומנטיקה ובהשכלה - חותר ספר זה להציג את עבודתה במבט רחב וממוקד מטרה: לאפשר לקורא לראות בבהירות רבה את האופנים שבהם הוא עלול להיהפך לקריקטורה אנוכית, במקום לאישיות מוסרית, מקורית ויוצרת. הספר גם מציע אפשרות לקורא לחרוג ולהשתחרר ממצב זה באמצעות מאמץ להתבונן, לדמיין ולשנות את מערכת דימויו הפנימיים לאורו של הטוב. מאמץ זה פירושו להיות אנושי.

The essay examines three literary memoirs of illness (Giving up the Ghost (2003), Love’s Work (1995) and Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998)) and their location in the recent development of illness narratives in anglophone culture. I showcase within a phenomenological framework how the three books defamiliarize the critical moment of diagnosis, reject readers’ sympathy and invite readers to broaden their repertoire of what well-being might feel like (including chronic illness).

Abstract Iris Murdoch makes frequent remarks that seem to identify love and knowledge. I attempt to make sense of these remarks, noting some obvious and important objections to such an identification. Pace those objections, I suggest, she is not merely committing a category confusion between an emotion and an epistemic status, or the content of a certain kind of state of mind. What Murdoch is talking about is more a matter of knowing than of knowledge: she is interested not so much in an epistemic status or an epistemic content, as in a complex of particular activities of cognitive exploring that are distinctive of a just and loving sensibility of attention. I explore some of these activities, mentioning five in particular. I note how they imply that there are special epistemic viewpoints, and wonder in closing how that admission (epistemic elitism) can be reconciled with our inclination to say that if anything is knowledge, then in principle it is available to anyone to know it (epistemic egalitarianism).

How can metaphysics be a guide to morals? For twentieth-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, this was the central question of philosophy, and I argue that her answers to it converge with those of nineteenth-century writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. For both thinkers, a transcendent evaluative reality places moral demands on their characters, defines the general terms of their moral consciousness, and influences their experience of the presence or absence of moral coherence in a way that shatters self-consoling myths and opens their imaginations toward the possibility of goodness. Ultimately, both connect transcendent value realism to immanent evaluative consciousness in surprisingly congruent ways.

Quel(s) rapport(s) est-il possible de tracer entre l’éthique et la politique? Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot et Stanley Cavell, à partir de trois positions philosophiques très différentes, ont élaboré des stratégies de réponse à cette question que le présent ouvrage se propose de rendre explicites et d’explorer. Ainsi, l’esthétique de l’existence, les exercices spirituels et le perfectionnisme moral y sont combinés afin de construire un arrière-plan conceptuel et pratique permettant de saisir à la fois les enjeux politiques d’une « éthique de soi » et l’incontournable dimension éthique d’une « politique de nous-mêmes ». Cet ouvrage entend contribuer à l’élaboration d’une « philosophie analytique de la politique » dont le but est de rendre visibles l’existence et le fonctionnement concret du pouvoir dans ses ramifications quotidiennes; une telle entreprise se noue de façon étroite avec une analyse des « techniques de l’ordinaire », c’est-à-dire de ces pratiques que les individus utilisent pour donner une forme à leur vie et pour transformer leur rapport à eux-mêmes, aux autres et au monde.

Scientific and scholarly attention to psychedelics has recently faced a resurgence. Recent studies suggest that psychedelic experiences can change values and behavioral dispositions, for example increase appreciation of nature and increase prosocial behavior. For this reason psychedelics have been identified as a promising option for moral neuroenhancement. However, we still struggle to understand these changes in the valuations psychedelics induce, or why exactly they are morally enhancing.

In this thesis I construct a philosophical framework to understand these changes. I combine Iris Murdoch and Abraham Maslow’s thinking with empirical studies on psychedelics and experiences of self-transcendence. Psychedelics induce experiences of self-transcendence which involve evaluative changes. I argue that these changes are not random but result from an intelligible process. I first claim that psychedelics in some cases induce unselfing, that is, perspectival and evaluative changes resulting from reduction of salience attributed to oneself. By reducing egoic centering, unselfing opens our attention to the world and can cause perspectival widening from egocentric into more allocentric (other-directed) or cosmocentric (universal) perspective. The second main claim is that the process of unselfing is often connected to sharpened perception of values. The increased attention to the world and reduced egocentric attributions of salience, resulting from unselfing, can widen our evaluative context and make it possible to perceive or grasp intrinsic values better, thus ‘tuning the moral compass’ away from instrumental egocentric mode of evaluation.

This thesis makes an original contribution to current discussions on moral neuroenhancement by presenting a well-elaborated connection between the experiences of self-transcendence and the evaluative changes. At least some changes in values associated with psychedelic experiences are related to unselfing. Further the framework provided is relevant not only for understanding value changes in psychedelic experiences, but it can be used to understand and to conceptually and theoretically integrate various phenomena which involve unselfing and techniques that aim at spiritual, moral and existential changes. Another original contribution of this thesis is that psychedelic experiences and moral neuroenhancement are discussed with the conceptual means of Murdoch’s and Maslow’s thought.

Abstract

This dissertation identifies a hitherto unnoticed significance in Iris Murdoch’s fiction of the close relationship between Murdoch and one of the most important men in her life, her Oxford friend, Frank Thompson. It argues that she memorialised him in her prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea (1978), in a complex web of references, symbols and clues, both hidden and overt, which create a metatextual memorial, or form of elegy, for Thompson within the text. In this way Murdoch’s elegy for Thompson is a significant link in the evolution of the elegiac form, from a readable verse memorial into an implied, invisible, wordless lament. Thompson served with British Special Forces in the Second World War, and was captured by Bulgarian fascists and shot by firing squad. I argue that his death made a lasting impact on Murdoch, and his elegisation in The Sea, The Sea constituted a watershed in her fiction. This dissertation reveals and explores Murdoch’s hidden elegy for Thompson in The Sea, The Sea, and its contextualisation within her wider body of work. It frames the memorial of Thompson in a parallel series of metatextual references to another significant lover whom she met after the end of the War, Franz Baermann Steiner, and explains this complementary context in relation to her primary purpose: a memorial to Thompson. Thus this dissertation explains how and why this memorialisation of Thompson and Steiner may have been undertaken, what effect it may have had on her later fiction, and how its creation plays an important role in the development of the literary elegiac form.