Reading Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 303018966X ISBN 13: 9783030189662

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Synopsis

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. 

About this title

About the Author

Nora Hämäläinen is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic.

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University in South Australia.

Review

“Iris Murdoch’s most challenging philosophical work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, was the culmination of a lifetime of reflection, yet it has received little sustained attention from researchers. The editors of this volume have performed an extraordinary service to old and new readers of Murdoch alike by assembling a diverse and gifted set of contributors to comment on individual chapters of this unique work and on some of its persistent themes, tensions, and preoccupations.  In seeking to ‘make Murdoch more easily approachable,’ the volume provides multiple avenues into her thought and takes inspiration from Murdoch’s own distinctive temperament to open previously unexplored spaces for reflection. Brimming with original and valuable insights, the book as a whole is a fitting tribute to a singular thinker whose multi-faceted contributions we are still in the process of discovering.” (Maria Antonaccio, Professor of Religious Studies, Bucknell University, USA)

“The editors and many of the contributors point out that Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is written throughout in the spirit of conversation with her great interlocutors – Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant, Wittgenstein amongst others – and that it invites her readers to join the conversation. The contributors to this fine collection have responded in ways for which Murdoch would have been grateful. They explicate her work, traverse it, dig deep into it, criticise and celebrate it, always mindful that her philosophical and literary sensibility were inseparable from and informed each other each. This book will enable its readers to engage more deeply with one of the most important–perhaps the most important–moral philosopher of the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.” (Raimond Gaita, Professorial Fellow, Melbourne Law School & Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy, King's College London)

“In this valuable volume, the recent revival of interest in Iris Murdoch as a philosopher takes a further significant step. The contributors offer an accessible and illuminating critical encounter with the central elements of Murdoch’s most sustained and provocative demonstration of the continuing relevance of our metaphysical and moral inheritance to our current self-understanding.” (Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford, UK)

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 20thcentury 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. (Nora Hämäläinen is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic, Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University in South Australia)

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 303018966X
• ISBN 13: 9783030189662
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 299
• Editor: Hämäläinen Nora, Dooley Gillian