•  3
    Veganism and betrayal
    Balthazar 2 (6-7). 2024.
  •  21
    Murdochian Mind (edited book)
    with Mark Hopwood
    Routledge. 2022.
    An outstanding reference source to the full span of Murdoch's work, comprising 37 specially commissioned chapters written by an international team of leading scholars. This is the first volume to do justice to the incredibly rich and wide-ranging nature of her work. Divided into five parts, the volume covers the following areas: - A guide to Murdoch's key philosophical texts, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. - Core themes and concepts in Murdoch's philosoph…Read more
  •  27
    The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas (review)
    The Iris Murdoch Review 14. 2023.
  •  144
    Iris Murdoch: Trust in the World
    In Mark Alfano, David Collins & Iris Jovanovic (eds.), Perspectives on Trust in the History of Philosophy, Lexington. 2023.
    If Annette Baier is right that ‘some degree of trust is … the very basis of morality” (Baier 2004, 180) , it is surprising that a philosopher so interested in moral psychology and interpersonal relationships such as Iris Murdoch does not explicitly discuss trust in her work. However, on closer inspection, Murdoch’s proposal of an ethics focused on realism, unselfing and attention crucially depends upon the possibility of trust – trust in reality, and in one’s own capacity for moral vision. Conne…Read more
  •  5
    Mirror of Obedience: The Poems and Selected Prose of Simone Weil (edited book)
    with Philip Wilson
    Bloomsbury. 2023.
    Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the foremost French philosophers of the 20th century; a mystic, activist, and writer whose profound work continues to intrigue and inspire today. Mirror of Obedience collects together Weil's poetry and autobiographical writings translated into English for the first time. It offers a rare glimpse into a more personal and introspective Weil than we usually encounter. She was writing and re-working her poems until the end of her life and in a letter from London to…Read more
  •  10
    Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.
  •  127
    How do we see the world aright? This question is central to Iris Murdoch’s philosophy as well as to that of her great source of inspiration, Simone Weil. For both of them, not only our action, but the very quality of our being depends on the ability to see things as they are, where vision is both a metaphor for immediate understanding and a literal expression of the requirement to train our perception so as to get rid of illusions. For both, too, the method to achieve this goal is attention. For…Read more
  •  80
    Moral Perception Beyond Supervenience: Iris Murdoch’s Radical Perspective
    Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (2): 273-288. 2019.
    Among the possible ways of gaining moral knowledge, moral perception figures as a controversial yet fruitful option. If moral perception is possible, moral disagreement is addressed not by appealing to principles but to the process and the objects of perception, and moral progress occurs not through deliberation but by refining one’s perceptual faculties. The possibility of “seeing clearly and justly” is at the heart of Iris Murdoch’s thought, but Murdoch herself does not put forth a system…Read more
  •  135
    Landing with the Firefly
    Constructivist Foundations 17 (3): 210-211. 2022.
    Open peer commentary on the article “Loving the Earth by Loving a Place: A Situated Approach to the Love of Nature” by Laura Candiotto. Abstract: I reflect on the significance of our relationships with a natural place from the perspective of animal and environmental ethics. Connecting Candiotto’s article with other environmental thinkers, I explore the importance of particularity and of problematizing anthropocentrism, and end by raising three questions about the broader application of one’s lov…Read more
  •  23
    The Reification of Non-Human Animals
    Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 32 (1): 1-15. 2022.
    This paper takes up Axel Honneth’s suggestion that we, in the 21st century Western world, should revisit the Marxian idea of reification; unlike Honneth, however, this paper applies reification to the ways in which humans relate to non-human animals, particularly in the context of scientific experiments. Thinking about these practices through the lens of reification, the paper argues, yields a more helpful understanding of what is regarded as problematic in those practices than the standard anim…Read more
  •  398
    The Animals We Eat: Between Attention and Ironic Detachment
    Journal of Animal Ethics 12 (1): 32-50. 2022.
    This article engages with two fundamental attitudes toward animals who are used for human consumption: attention and ironic detachment. Taken as polarities linked with animal consumption and the refusal thereof, I discuss how these two attitudes are shaped and manifested during moments of encounter with the animals in question. Starting from a striking photograph from the Lychee and Dog Meat Festival in China, I explore the embodiment of these attitudes in the “gaze” of human participants during…Read more
  •  956
    The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil
    Routledge Studies in Ethics and Moral Theory. 2022.
    This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actio…Read more
  •  404
    Skepticism and the Value of Distrust
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Faced with current urgent calls for more trust in experts, especially in high impact and politically sensitive domains, such as climate science and COVID-19, the complex and problematic nature of public trust in experts and the need for a more critical approach to the topic are easy to overlook. Scepticism – at least in its Humean mitigated form that encourages independent, questioning attitudes – can prove valuable to democratic governance, but stands in opposition to the cognitive dependency e…Read more
  •  75
    Forms of moral impossibility
    European Journal of Philosophy 30 (1): 361-373. 2021.
    An important yet often unacknowledged aspect of moral discourse is the phenomenon of moral impossibility, which challenges more widely accepted models of moral discussion and deliberation as a choice among possible options. Starting from observations of the new possibilities of anti immigrant attitudes and hate crimes which have been described by the press as something being “unleashed,” the paper asks what it means for something to enter or not the sphere of possibility in the moral sense, and …Read more
  •  66
    Ethical Attention and the Self in Iris Murdoch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53 (1): 24-39. 2020.
    As attention, in philosophy, is mainly discussed in the philosophy of mind, its ethical aspects have remained relatively unexplored. One notable exception is Iris Murdoch. Another philosopher, Maur...
  •  12
    Wittgenstein
    In Piers Rawling & Philip Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, Routledge. 2018.
    Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of language; his insights into how language works can be applied to translation. This chapter is an overview of some ways of doing so, drawing on recent studies in Wittgenstein and translation. The focus is on the practice of translation rather than translation theory. I introduce Wittgenstein and explain some controversies around his method, particularly on the possibility of having theory of language. Wittgenstein’s…Read more
  •  30
    Exploring Ethical Assumptions and Bias in Medical Ethics Teaching
    Teaching Ethics 19 (2): 233-244. 2019.
    This paper is a reflection on an experiment undertaken during a Medical Ethics lecture delivered to a group of medical students in the UK as part of a project for a programme in Higher Education Practice. The aim of the project, following Paulo Freire’s idea of ‘liberating education,’ was to identify students’ ethical assumptions and biases in relation to a problem of resource allocation in healthcare, and their role in decision-making. The experiment showed the importance placed by medical stud…Read more
  •  86
    In their daily practices, many ethical vegans choose what to eat, wear, and buy among a range that is limited to the exclusion of animal products. Rather than considering and then rejecting the idea of using such products, doing so often does not occur to them as a possibility at all. In other cases, when confronted with the possibility of consuming animal products, vegans have claimed to reject it by saying that it would be impossible for them to do so. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘moral impo…Read more
  •  609
    A Secular Mysticism? Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and the Idea of Attention
    In M. del Carmen Paredes (ed.), Filosofía, arte y mística, Salamanca University Press. 2017.
    In this paper I consider Simone Weil’s notion of attention as the fundamental and necessary condition for mystical experience, and investigate Iris Murdoch’s secular adaptation of attention as a moral attitude. After exploring the concept of attention in Weil and its relation to the mystical, I turn to Murdoch to address the following question: how does Murdoch manage to maintain Weil’s idea of attention, even keeping the importance of mysticism, without Weil’s religious metaphysical background?…Read more
  •  12
    Simone Weil, Venice Saved
    with Philip Wilson
    Bloomsbury. 2019.
    The French philosopher Simone Weil worked on (but did not finish) Venice Saved, a tragedy about the conspiracy to overthrow the Republic of Venice in 1618. It has been largely ignored and has never been published in an English translation. Interest in Weil’s work has increased massively since her death and continues to grow, so that publishing this play in English will enable readers to expand their view of a writer whose work is in fragments. We have also translated the notes that Weil wrote ab…Read more