Lesley Jamieson

In this article, I offer a child-centred account of the value of company-keeping relationships between children and adults. These are relationships enjoyed by a child and an adult who is neither a mere acquaintance nor integrally involved in that child's care or upbringing. The adult party might, for example, be a visiting grandparent, a neighbour the child likes to help with gardening, or a ‘fun auntie’ who occasionally babysits. After defining company-keeping relationships, I argue that their child-centred value varies significantly across contexts depending on how the adult party relates to the child and on the needs of the particular child. In some contexts, they promote the child's capacity for independent agency and mitigate undue shame. When these goods arise, it is not despite but because of the fact that the adult party is an outsider to routine family life and is not responsible for the child's ‘training’. I then investigate whether such relationships should be protected or promoted to respect children's rights of association. While I conclude that most company-keeping relationships are excluded from these rights, I defend the more modest view that a child can be morally wronged by a parent who severs or prevents them from forming company-keeping relationships.

This chapter provides a brief overview of behaviourism in post-war philosophy of mind, focusing on its roots in verificationist and ordinary language strains of clarificatory philosophy. Murdoch is shown to have some sympathies with philosophical behaviourism and to also want to reject the Private Theatre model of self-knowledge. She was, however, critical of its neglect of inner life experience and misdescription of thinking. Murdoch’s responses to behaviourism are used to illuminate her distinctive literary approach to philosophical clarification and her view that conceptual frameworks have practical ramifications for human life.

This chapter considers the relationship between Iris Murdoch’s St. Anne’s writings and The Sovereignty of Good. Some scholars have argued that the earlier writings laid some important groundwork that Murdoch later used to defend a unique form of moral realism. The works that appeared later are thus a culmination of a project that had previously been incomplete. From the perspective of philosophical methodology, however, Murdoch’s practical aims and poetic approach to clarification did not change. Reading The Sovereignty of Good as a transcendental defence of moral realism, I argue, occludes Murdoch’s pessimism about the possibility of placing metaphysical beliefs on secure footing and art’s role as a site of both moral betterment and the restoration of metaphysical conviction.

This chapter provides an overview of two major trends in the reception of Murdoch’s philosophical writings. According to the first, Murdoch’s style obscures the substance of her writing such that bringing her insights to bear on contemporary philosophical debates requires salvaging them from her unclear prose. The second adopts a synoptic view of her career that abstracts away from the particularities of how she writes and the interventions she made (particularly during the first decade of her career). The author claims that it is possible to understand Murdoch as a philosopher whose early writings embody an idiosyncratic vision of philosophical clarity and achieve this because of—not despite—the fact that she had a mind on the borders of philosophy, literature, and politics.

This introduction describes Iris Murdoch’s education at Oxford and early career as a researcher at Newnham College, Cambridge. While before and during the Second World War, Murdoch had inhabited a heterogenous philosophical scene at Oxford, the post-war period was marked by the linguistic “Revolution in Philosophy”. The rise of clarificatory philosophy meant that the very qualities that distinguished her—that she had a mind that bordered philosophy, literature, and politics—came to seem like liabilities. This chapter examines how clarificatory philosophers viewed the aims, audience, and language proper to philosophy—especially how they distinguished between moral philosophy and ‘preaching’ and between clarity and the poetic. Doing so contextualizes what Murdoch went on to achieve in transforming disadvantages into strengths and gives us a clue about how we should read her early writings.

This chapter examines the relationship between moral philosophy and moralism. While Murdoch’s contemporaries saw linguistic analysis as a way to practise moral philosophy neutrally, she questions whether this separation is possible or desirable. How one practises philosophy is, like all activity, a manifestation of one’s personal vision such that we can always meaningfully ask of a philosopher “What is he afraid of?” While Murdoch traces Hare’s focus on autonomous decision-making and action to post-war anxieties about conformism, dogmatism, and intolerance, Murdoch’s work is unified by her fear of the loss of concepts. After reviewing three ways of interpreting the significance of conceptual loss drawn from Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Niklas Forsberg, this chapter turns to Murdoch’s socialist writings to identify new connections between the Current View and the socialist movement’s loss of vision.

This chapter provides an overview of Murdoch’s engagement with Kantian aesthetics and existentialist philosophy. Murdoch believed that contemporary novelists, literary critics, and analytic philosophers of art had taken inspiration from the wrong aspect of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, focusing on the beautiful rather than the sublime. She diagnoses their systematic neglect of great literature (a category into which she places Shakespeare and Tolstoy) in terms of a limited, behaviourist and existentialist conception of human individuality and freedom as well as an inadequate moral psychology. This chapter uses Murdoch’s writings on literature and philosophy from her St. Anne’s period to illustrate her uniquely literary approach to philosophical clarification and the practical dimension of her work.

This chapter provides an analysis of Murdoch’s responses to post-war British moral philosophy. It provides an overview of one major current, ethical non-naturalism, and its development from G. E. Moore’s Intuitionism to A. J. Ayer’s Emotivism to R. M. Hare’s Universal Prescriptivism, highlighting major elements of what Murdoch referred to as “The Current View”. Murdoch complained that this view systematically neglected major regions of moral experience that could not be analysed in terms of chosen principles and empirically given facts—particularly those connected with the assessment and development of “vision”. Murdoch’s introduction of that and other related metaphors and analogies is meant to illuminate the unity of the moral life and our capacity for genuine moral insight. The focus of this chapter is on contextualizing Murdoch’s writings and illustrating the methods she employs in responding to then-dominant moral philosophies.

In this paper, I challenge standard views of the moral badness of sentimentality defended by art critics and philosophers. Accounts based on untruthfulness and self-indulgence lack the resources to both explain the badness of bad sentimentality and to allow that there are benign instances. We are sometimes permitted to be sentimental even though it is self-serving. A non-moralistic account should allow for this. To provide such an account, I first outline a substantive view of the ideal of unsentimentality by turning to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. Rilke celebrates the artist for his unsentimental love of his subjects and “untiring objective wakefulness” to them. I then turn to Iris Murdoch’s ethics of attention (itself influenced by Rilke) to explain why this ideal is so difficult to live up to in practice, the various ways that we fall short, and what our failures mean. What Murdoch contributes is both a sense that the lovingly attentive attitude that Rilke describes is morally—and not just artistically—important and a compassionate account of the human egocentrism that inhibits it. By thinking of sentimentality as a failure of moral attention, we can appreciate how particular instances differ from one another. Sentimentality can console us in difficult times or can gratify our egos; it can be a form of escapism or can rigidly enclose reality; and it can be harmlessly self-serving or a selfish failure to morally attend to the other when it counts. I conclude by outlining some ways that being seen with Cézanne-like moral attention can matter to us.

Defenders of two Rationality Views of love—the Qualities View and the Personhood View—have drawn on Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings to highlight a connection between love and a “realistic” perspective on the beloved. Murdoch does not inform the basic structure of these views—she is rather introduced as a supplement who shows that in love, we pay accurate, nuanced, unguarded, and unflinching attention to the other. In this paper, I contend that these authors have failed to see that Murdoch offers a distinct view of love and is inappropriate to enlist as an ally. This is in large part because they have missed the full sense of what Murdoch means by connecting love and realism. I contend that for Murdoch, to love someone means seeing them in light of a realistic vision of what it means to be human; this includes an appreciation of the limits of freedom, the formative influence of personal history, and the nature and extent of our differences from one another. This helps us to see why Murdoch variously describes loving attention as realistic, compassionate, tolerant, and extremely difficult. It also sheds light on some important and familiar ways that we criticize one another's grounds for love.

This article argues that Iris Murdoch, who was supervised by John Wisdom during her 1947–48 fellowship at Newnham College Cambridge, went on to practice philosophy in a recognizably Wisdomian manner in her earliest paper, “Thinking and Language” (1951). To do so, I first describe how Wisdom understood philosophical perplexity and paradox. One task that linguistic philosophers should take up is to investigate the concrete cases that give paradoxical philosophical statements their sense and to sift the truth they contain from the distortion. I then show how this vision informed his critical reception of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind as well as his own investigation of the Hidden Stream Paradox. Finally, I trace a similar approach to Murdoch's discussions of a paradox I call the Coarse Net Paradox. Recognizing Murdoch's intellectual inheritance from Wisdom enables us to see a thus‐far overlooked connection between Murdoch and the tradition of linguistic philosophy.

Iris Murdoch's famous case of M and D illustrates the moral importance of learning to see others in a more favourable light through renewed attention. Yet if we do not read this case in the wider context of Murdoch's work, we are liable to overlook the attitudes and transformations involved in coming to change one's mind as M does. Stanley Cavell offers one such reading and denies that the case represents a change in M's sense of herself or the possibilities for her world of the kind exemplified by Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. In this essay, I challenge Cavell's reading, suggesting that the case, while it may not be an exemplar of the perfectionist outlook as described by Cavell, can and should be interpreted in perfectionist terms. To see this, I reflect on Murdoch's views on the endless perfectibility of language, the importance of humility, and the role of love and attention in moral learning. I conclude that Murdoch's work uniquely sheds light on how we might cultivate a perfectionist outlook in ourselves and others, and describes the distinctive role that some novels can play in moral education.

In recent years, a new scholarly gaze has been cast on four women‒Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch‒who have come to be known as the ‘Wartime Quartet’. During the postwar period, when women were still scarce in the discipline, these four flourished as philosophers. New details about their wartime education give us materials to reflect on what enabled them to develop their unique philosophical voices. Their work dispels widespread philosophical dogmas, especially scientistic interpretations of naturalism that exclude value from the fabric of reality. Through their attention to the details of ordinary life, they avoid flattening the complexities of moral learning, especially where this involves navigating intergenerational differences. The articles in this Suite look to the Wartime Quartet's writings and learning conditions to show that, far from being of purely historical interest, they shed fresh light on the aims and challenges of moral education and offer a critical perspective on current pedagogical practices‒particularly in the teaching of philosophy.

This book explores Iris Murdoch as a philosopher who, through her distinctive methodology, exploits the advantages of having a mind on the borders of literature and politics in her early career writings (pre-The Sovereignty of Good). By focusing on a single decade of Murdoch’s early career, Jamieson tracks connections between her views on the state of literature and politics in postwar Britain and her approach to the philosophy of mind and moral philosophy. Furthermore, this close study reveals that, far from a stylistic quirk, Murdoch’s use of metaphors, analogies, and other literary devices is internal to her methodology. Finally, rather than asking what Murdoch’s views are, this work will ask “what is Murdoch trying to achieve with her writings and public lectures, and how does she go about this?” By answering the latter question, we will have a new strategy for interpreting her writings more generally. The book contributes to the growing body of scholarship focusing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophical writings, and on women in the history of analytic philosophy.