The acclaimed author of The Good Apprentice draws on the entire history of philosophy--and particularly on Plato and Kant--to formulate her own model of morality and demonstrate how thoroughly it is bound up with our daily lives. "An utterly absorbing book."--The Wall Street Journal.
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.
Table of Contents
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals1. Conceptions of Unity. Art 2. Fact and Value 3. Schopenhauer 4. Art and Religion 5. Comic and Tragic 6. Consciousness and Thought - I 7. Derrida and Structuralism 8. Consciousness and Thought - II 9. Wittgenstein and the Inner Life 10. Notes on Will and Duty 11. Imagination 12. Morals and Politics 13. The Ontological Proof 14. Descartes and Kant 15. Martin Buber and God 16. Morality and Religion 17. Axioms, Duties, Eros 18. Void 19. Metaphysics: A Summary Acknowledgments Index
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
"Iris Murdoch has written a book which concerns all of us as human beings There are pages here that one wants to embrace her for, pages that say things of fundamental human importance in a way that they have never quite been said before" Noel Malcolm in the Sunday Telegraph
"This is philosophy dragged from the cloister, dusted down and made freshly relevant to suffering and egoism, death and religious ecstasy and how we feel compasison for others" Terry Eagleton in the Guardian
"Gripping it enchants with a clause that sets you daydreaming, captivates with a stream of thought, empowers with reminiscences" Ian Hacking in the London Review of Books
"Anyone who has even the slightest interest in philosophical matters will find Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals an utterly absorbing book" The Wall Street Journal
"Remarkable Iris Murdoch has once again put us all in her debt." Alasdair MacIntyre in The New York Times Book Review