Dane Michael Kirby

Iris Murdoch, as a thinker, demonstrates a remarkably sustained interest in various forms of love. Such an interest has been long appreciated and studied in regard to her twenty-six novels, but markedly less so in regard to her philosophy. This is both unfortunate and incongruous, since Murdoch herself clearly regards love as of central importance in her most renowned and successful piece of philosophy, The Sovereignty of Good (1970): “Instances of the facts, as I shall boldly call them, which interest me and which seem to have been forgotten of ‘theorized away’ are the fact that an unexamined life can be virtuous and the fact that love is a central concept in morals.” (IP, 1964, 2) In the same work, Murdoch continues to be explicit about the concept of love, in relation to philosophy: “We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central” (OGG, 1969, 45). I take this last statement to be Murdoch’s raison d’être as a philosopher, in that she attempts to make the concept of love central to (her own) philosophy. I consider this to be true of Murdoch’s philosophy from beginning to end, from her first radio talk, ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’ (1950), to her last book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). If this were true, any substantial reading of Murdoch would require close attention to the concept of love, as possibly a central concept, in relation to Murdoch’s other philosophical concerns. In this thesis, I shall show the above claim to be true only of Murdoch’s earlier philosophy (1950-1956), where the word ‘love’ is, indeed, “rarely mentioned”. In making what is perhaps the more difficult case – that Murdoch’s earlier philosophy should be understood by her philosophical commitment to make the concept of love central to (her) philosophy – I hope to encourage the extension of such a reading to Murdoch’s philosophy as a whole.