Iris Murdoch is a celebrated philosopher and novelist. Was she a political theorist? Many say that she focused upon the personal and the moral at the expense of the social and the political. However, this book argues the contrary. Murdoch had lifelong interests in politics, just as she did in literature and philosophy. She saw historical experience as the foundation upon which the inter-linked activities of literature, philosophy and politics are based. In reading Murdoch we get a clear insight into the nature of the modern political world. From an early political radicalism to a later anti-utopianism, Murdoch reacted to the great political events of the twentieth century, notably the Holocaust, the rise and fall of ideologies, sexual repression, and the realities of totalitarianism. Her political philosophy conceptualized relations between moral and political spheres, and her novels deal imaginatively with questions of migration, refugees, sexuality and freedom. Her letters and journals provide moment to moment reactions to major political events. Iris Murdoch and the Political presents a lively discussion of Iris Murdoch and her political thought, taking in the nature of socialist thought, the New Left and liberalism in the UK in the latter part of the twentieth century. The book is based upon a wide variety of sources, including Murdoch's journals, letters, reviews, essays, novels and books. It draws upon scholarship in philosophy, literature and intellectual history in developing a coherent sense of how Murdoch theorized the political.

Iris Murdoch was a notable philosopher before she was a notable novelist and her work was brave, brilliant, and independent. This volume presents essays by critics and admirers of her work, together with a long Introduction on her career, reception, and achievement, an unpublished piece by Murdoch herself, and a memoir by her husband John Bayley.

In Why Iris Murdoch Matters Gary Browning draws on as yet unpublished archival material to present an unrivalled overview of Murdoch's work and thought. Browning argues for Murdoch's position amongst the key theorists of modern life, and discusses in detail her engagement with the notion of late modernity. Her multiple perspectives on art, philosophy, religion, politics and the self all relate to how she understands the nature of late modernity. Browning lucidly illustrates that through both her thought and fiction we can grasp the significance of issues that remain of paramount importance today: the possibilities of a moral life without foundations, the meaning of philosophy in a post-metaphysical age, the prospects of politics without ideological certainties and the significance of art after realism. A totally original work arguing persuasively that Iris Murdoch not only matters but is absolutely central to how we think through the contemporary age.

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals was Iris Murdoch’s major philosophical testament and a highly original and ambitious attempt to talk about our time. Yet in the scholarship on her philosophical work thus far it has often been left in the shade of her earlier work. This volume brings together 16 scholars who offer accessible readings of chapters and themes in the book, connecting them to Murdoch’s larger oeuvre, as well as to central themes in 20th century and contemporary thought. The essays bring forth the strength, originality, and continuing relevance of Murdoch’s late thought, addressing, among other matters, her thinking about the Good, the role and nature of metaphysics in the contemporary world, the roles of art in human understanding, questions of unity and plurality in thinking, the possibilities of spiritual life without God, and questions of style and sensibility in intellectual work.

A HISTORY AND CRITIQUE OF THE WRITINGS OF IRIS MURDOCH.

We are self-conscious creatures thrown into a world which is not of our making. What is the connection between being self-conscious and being related to an objective world? Descartes and Kant, in different ways and with different emphases, argued that self-conscious subjects such as us must be related to an objective world. Philosophers in the twentieth century were less ambitious: self-conscious subjects must only think or experience the world as objective. The Practical Self argues that the answer to our question lies in a set of enigmatic remarks by the eighteenth-century philosopher, physicist, and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. 'One should say it is thinking, just as one says, it is lightning', Lichtenberg writes. 'To say cogito is already too much To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement.' Lichtenberg is raising a puzzle here about our grounds for recognising ourselves as the agents of our thinking. Its solution is to understand that we have practical grounds to think of ourselves as the intellectual agents. We are thus practical selves: intellectual agents who have distinctively practical grounds to recognise ourselves as such. And our faith in ourselves as practical selves is sustained through interaction with others. The argument of this book is that self-consciousness requires faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking and that this faith is sustained by a practices which relate us to other thinkers. Self-consciousness connects us to a world of others.

A Philosophy to Live By highlights Murdoch's distinctive conception of philosophy as a spiritual or existential practice and enlists the resources of her thought to explore a wide range of thinkers and debates at the intersections of moral philosophy, religion, art, and politics.

This book explores recent developments in ethics of virtue. While acknowledging the Aristotelian roots of modern virtue ethics – with its emphasis on the moral importance of character – this collection recognizes that more recent accounts of virtue have been shaped by many other influences, such as Aquinas, Hume, Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx, Confucius and Lao-tzu. The authors also examine the bearing of virtue ethics on other disciplines such as psychology, sociology and theology, as well as attending to some wider public, professional and educational implications of the ethics of virtue. This pioneering book will be invaluable to researchers and students concerned with the many contemporary varieties and applications of virtue ethics.

The Second World War marked an ethical turn in British fiction. The author of this study demonstrates this by closely examining John Fowles's and Iris Murdoch's works as post-war meta-textual magical-realist novels interested in ethics and the nature of contemporary reality. These ethical novels transcend mere morality to explore the essence of the Good. Through paradigms of human experience, they direct our attention towards the Other and impart moral principles based on acts of Goodness. The author assesses the moral intimations in Fowles's The Magus and Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea in the context of their philosophical writings, mainly The Aristos and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals respectively. She shows that Fowles and Murdoch endeavour to instruct the reader morally through the accessible language of fiction.