These never before published writings comprise Iris Murdoch's passionate wartime correspondence with two early intimates: the poet Frank Thompson, brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, who was killed in 1944, and David Hicks, with whom she had a dramatic affair, engagement, and breakup. It also includes the journal that Murdoch kept as a touring actress during August of 1939. The selection sheds new light on a brilliant young mind ("sharp and polished as a sword" as Frances Wilson describes it), while painting a vivid picture of life during the Second World War.

These never before published writings comprise Iris Murdoch's passionate wartime correspondence with two early intimates: the poet Frank Thompson, brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, who was killed in 1944, and David Hicks, with whom she had a dramatic affair, engagement, and breakup. It also includes the journal that Murdoch kept as a touring actress during August of 1939. The selection sheds new light on a brilliant young mind ("sharp and polished as a sword" as Frances Wilson describes it), while painting a vivid picture of life during the Second World War.

These never before published writings comprise Iris Murdoch's passionate wartime correspondence with two early intimates: the poet Frank Thompson, brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, who was killed in 1944, and David Hicks, with whom she had a dramatic affair, engagement, and breakup. It also includes the journal that Murdoch kept as a touring actress during August of 1939. The selection sheds new light on a brilliant young mind ("sharp and polished as a sword" as Frances Wilson describes it), while painting a vivid picture of life during the Second World War.

A Writer at War is a treasury of one of the great women writers and thinkers of the 20th century - a fascinating private memoir which sheds new light on a brilliant mind in development, but also a remarkable historical document of life behind the scenes during the Second World War.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the painter Harry Weinberger engaged in over twenty years of close friendship and intellectual discourse, centred on sustained discussion of the practice, teaching and morality of art. This book presents a reappraisal of Murdoch’s novels – chiefly, three mature novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Nuns and Soldiers (1980) and The Good Apprentice (1985), and two enigmatic late novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma (1995) – which are perceived through the prism of her discourse with Weinberger. It draws on a run of almost 400 letters from Murdoch to Weinberger, and on Murdoch’s philosophical writings, Weinberger’s private writings, the remarks of both artists in interviews, and other material relating to their views on art and art history, much of which is unpublished and has received no previous critical attention. Scrutiny of their shared values, methods and the imagistic dialogue that takes place in their art provides original perspectives on Murdoch’s creativity, and new ways of understanding her experimentation with the visual arts. This book offers a new line of enquiry into Murdoch's novels, and into the relationship between literature and the visual arts.

Résumé éditeur : This book tells two intertwined stories, centered on twentieth-century moral philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. The first is the story of four friends who came up to Oxford together just before WWII. It is the story of their lives, loves, and intellectual preoccupations; it is a story about women trying to find a place in a man's world of academic philosophy. The second story is about these friends' shared philosophical project and their unintentional creation of a school of thought that challenged the dominant way of doing ethics. That dominant school of thought envisioned the world as empty, value-free matter, on which humans impose meaning. This outlook treated statements such as “this is good” as mere expressions of feeling or preference, reflecting no objective standards. It emphasized human freedom and demanded an unflinching recognition of the value-free world. The four friends diagnosed this moral philosophy as an impoverishing intellectual fad. This style of thought, they believed, obscured the realities of human nature and left people without the resources to make difficult moral choices or to confront evil. As an alternative, the women proposed a naturalistic ethics, reviving a line of thought running through Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, and enriched by modern biologists like Jane Goodall and Charles Darwin. The women proposed that there are, in fact, moral truths, based in facts about the distinctive nature of the human animal and what that animal needs to thrive."

Kierkegaard's relation to the field of philosophy is a particularly complex and disputed one. He rejected the model of philosophical inquiry that was mainstream in his day and was careful to have his pseudonymous authors repeatedly disassociate themselves from philosophy. But although it seems clear that Kierkegaard never regarded himself as a philosopher, there can be no doubt that his writings contain philosophical ideas and insights and have been profoundly influential in a number of different philosophical traditions.The present volume attempts to document these different traditions of the philosophical reception of Kierkegaard's thought. Tome III traces Kierkegaard's influence on Anglophone philosophy. It has long been thought that Kierkegaard played no role in this tradition, which for years was dominated by analytic philosophy. In this environment it was common to dismiss Kierkegaard along with the then current European philosophers who were influenced by him. However, a closer look reveals that in fact there were several thinkers in the US, Canada and Great Britain who were inspired by Kierkegaard even during the heyday of analytic philosophy. Today it can be said that Kierkegaard has made some serious inroads into mainstream Anglophone philosophy, with many authors seeking inspiration in his works for current discussions concerning ethics, personal identity, philosophy of religion, and philosophical anthropology.

"Iris Murdoch was one of the most interesting and wide-ranging philosophers in recent British history. In addition to her five works on moral philosophy and existentalism, including Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she was the author of twenty-five works of fiction, including The Sea, the Sea, winner of the Booker Prize, and The Black Prince, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. This collection reassesses her literary and philosophical output, focusing on her key literary works and the influence she had among contemporary philosophers" --

Iris Murdoch was the author of twenty-six bestselling novels. Her many love affairs, her war-work with UNRRA, her move from early communism to Thatcherism, her later life as a secular saint, her sad decline from Alzheimer's - all these events are detailed in this accessible chronological account of a world-famous and much loved British writer.

Tome III traces Kierkegaard's influence on Anglophone philosophy. It has long been thought that Kierkegaard played no role in this tradition, which for years was dominated by analytic philosophy. In this environment it was common to dismiss Kierkegaard along with the then current European philosophers who were influenced by him. However, a closer look reveals that in fact there were several thinkers in the US, Canada and Great Britain who were inspired by Kierkegaard even during the heyday of analytic philosophy. Current thinking now suggests that Kierkegaard has made some serious inroads into mainstream Anglophone philosophy, with many authors seeking inspiration in his works for current discussions concerning ethics, personal identity, philosophy of religion, and philosophical anthropology.