Why Iris Murdoch Matters

Gary Browning is Professor of Politics at Oxford Brookes University, UK where he is also Dean for Research in the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences.

The complex relationships Murdoch so carefully lays bare in her novels show the misery that people inflict on themselves and others by failing to attend properly to the reality at hand. Her philosophical works on metaphysics and ethics display her unique reaction to the dryness and radical individualism of the overly abstract philosophies of existentialist and analytic philosophers, who depict moral agents as freely choosing wills unencumbered, and undefined by, personal relations, detached from the communities in which they live. Murdoch attempts to recover traditional values lost in these philosophies by intimations in experience of the unifying presence of goodness that transcends subjective satisfaction. Good art and literature enable people to see and become more sensitive to the experience of others. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

• Introduction1. Murdoch and Modernity2. Philosophy: Plato and the Good3. The Modern Self in Search of Itself4. The Good5. The Time of the Angels: Religion After the Death of God6. Politics in a Post-ideological World7. Art After Realism8. The Life and Times of MurdochBibliographyIndex