Maria Gallego-Ortiz

Iris Murdoch situates imagination at the core of moral life, challenging moral philosophy’s preference for abstract universal principles over the particularity of lived experience. This paper reconstructs Murdoch’s concept of imagination by tracing her engagement with Plato’s distinction between eikasia and the Demiurge’s ‘high’ imagination, as well as Kant’s notions of empirical and esthetic imagination. I argue that Murdoch’s imagination is best understood as a hermeneutical capacity essential to moral vision. She distinguishes between egoistic fantasy, which distorts reality, and free and creative imagination, which enables a just and loving gaze upon the world. Through imagination, we can replace obscuring images with truer ones, making moral progress an exercise in vision and attention. Murdoch’s account thus offers an alternative to moral theories that overlook the inner life as a site of ethical transformation.

This paper explores how the experience of pregnancy offers a new perspective on hospitality for our times. It critiques Jacques Derrida’s notion that unconditional hospitality is ultimately impossible, arguing that his perspective is constrained by the male, master-of-the-house tradition which prioritizes the host’s subjectivity. The paper first outlines Derrida’s conceptualization of the aporetic relationship between the unconditional Law of hospitality and conditional laws of hospitality, where the male host’s subjectivity is perceived as threatened by the guest. Drawing on Tracy McNulty’s work, it examines this “hospitality of the master,” highlighting how the host’s personal identity and mastery underpin traditional hospitality. The paper then proposes rethinking hospitality through the lens of pregnancy, where the acceptance and nurturing of the fetus demonstrate an alternative model. In pregnancy, the pregnant woman’s identity is not threatened by the other (the fetus), but rather, she contains the other within herself while maintaining a unified subjectivity. This stands in contrast to the hospitality of the master. Finally, the paper explores biological phenomena in pregnancy, such as the absence of immunological rejection and the placenta’s mediating role, supporting a different way to conceive and live hospitality. Pregnancy thus serves as an embodied metaphor of hospitality, offering guidance on how to live it in our contemporary world.