Best known as the author of twenty-six novels, Iris Murdoch has also made significant contributions to the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays. Tracing Murdoch's journey to a modern Platonism, this volume includes incisive evaluations of the thought and writings of T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvior, and Elias Canetti, as well as key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, on the concept of love, and the role great literature can play in curing the ills of philosophy.Existentialists and Mystics not only illuminates the mysticism and intellectual underpinnings of Murdoch's novels, but confirms her major contributions to twentieth-century thought.
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry.
Show moreBest known as the author of twenty-six novels, Iris Murdoch has also made significant contributions to the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays. Tracing Murdoch's journey to a modern Platonism, this volume includes incisive evaluations of the thought and writings of T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvior, and Elias Canetti, as well as key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, on the concept of love, and the role great literature can play in curing the ills of philosophy.Existentialists and Mystics not only illuminates the mysticism and intellectual underpinnings of Murdoch's novels, but confirms her major contributions to twentieth-century thought.
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry.
Show morePart 1 Prologue: literature and philosophy - a conversation with Bryan Magee. Part 2 Nostalgia for the particular, 1951-57: thinking and language; nostalgia for the particular; metaphysics and ethics; vision and choice in morality. Part 3 Encountering existentialism, 1950-59: the novelist as metaphysician; the existentialist hero; Sartre's "The Emotions - Outline of a Theory"; De Beauvoir's "The Ethics of Ambiguity"; the image of mind; the existentialist political myth; Hegel in modern dress; existentialist bite. Part 4 The need for theory. 1956-66: knowing the void; T.S. Eliot as a moralist; a house of theory; mass, might and myth; the darkness of practical reason. Part 5 Towards a practical mysticism, 1959-78: the sublime and the good; existentialists and mystics; salvation by words; art is the limitation of nature. Part 6 Can literature help cure the ills of philosophy? 1959-61: the sublime and the beautiful revisited against dryness. Part 7 Re-reading Plato, 1964-86: the idea of perfection; on "God" and "good"; the sovereignty of good over other concepts; the fire and the sun - why Plato banished the artists; art and Eros - a dialogue about art; above the gods - a dialogue about religion.
Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry.
"Brilliantly readable . . . Murdoch can make the most demanding
questions of life accessible and exciting." —The Baltimore Sun
"Existentialists and Mystics desribes the intellectual journey
of a lifetime. This book is Murdoch's key. Readers will find much
here to stimulate, entertain and edify. No one conveys the beauty
and excitement of philosophy better than Murdoch." —Hilary
Spurling, Daily Telegraph
"Murdoch, a wondrous writer and a careful student of the history of
thought, is endowed a rare talent for philosophical writing—she
offers, in accessible prose, insight into some of the great
questoins that have preoccupied thinkers for centuries." —San Diego
Union
"Tight, graceful writing, and a pleasure to read . . . [Murdoch's
moral theory] has a real claim to our attention." —Elijah
Millgram, The Boston Review
"A perceptive investigation into the symbiotic relationship of
philosophy and literature." —The Guardian
Most readers think of Murdoch first as a novelist, but as this excellent anthology makes clear, she is an outstanding philosopher as well. After World War II, she established herself as an authority on existentialism, though she did not herself accept this doctrine, viewing it as stressing human autonomy to an undue degree. She locates a similar failing in much contemporary analytic moral philosophy. Instead, she thinks of values as objective: human beings contemplate them rather than create them. Her philosophy culminates in a nontheistic mysticism bearing strong affinities to Plato. The best introduction available to an important and unusual thinker; for all academic and most public libraries.‘David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio
"Brilliantly readable . . . Murdoch can make the most demanding
questions of life accessible and exciting." -The Baltimore
Sun
"Existentialists and Mystics desribes the intellectual
journey of a lifetime. This book is Murdoch's key. Readers will
find much here to stimulate, entertain and edify. No one conveys
the beauty and excitement of philosophy better than Murdoch."
-Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph
"Murdoch, a wondrous writer and a careful student of the history of
thought, is endowed a rare talent for philosophical writing-she
offers, in accessible prose, insight into some of the great
questoins that have preoccupied thinkers for centuries." -San
Diego Union
"Tight, graceful writing, and a pleasure to read . . . [Murdoch's
moral theory] has a real claim to our attention." -Elijah Millgram,
The Boston Review
"A perceptive investigation into the symbiotic relationship of
philosophy and literature." -The Guardian
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