Lesley Jamieson

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 recent years, there has been a renewed interest in Perceptual Intuitionism. A significant portion of the literature on the topic has focused on the ethical perception defense, the supposition seeming to be that one must defend Perceptual Intuitionism by showing that one can have ethical experiences which immediately and non-inferentially justify one’s beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of particular actions. This thesis rejects this thought by proposing an alternative defense of Perceptual Intuitionism which employs the Wittgensteinian concept of criteria and an understanding of principles of prima facie duties as “grammatical propositions”