Scholars who have attempted to explain Iris Murdoch’s moral realism have done so in widely divergent ways, some characterizing her as a classical moral realist, others as a pragmatic moral realist, and still others as a “reflexive realist.”See, e.g., respectively, Fergus Kerr, “Back to Plato with Iris Murdoch,” in Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1997), 68–88; Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005); and Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The (...) Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the purpose of this article, I follow Maria Antonaccio’s characterization of these realisms. See pages 3–4. None of these attempts, however, capture adequately Murdoch’s distinctive position. In an effort to improve upon these accounts, this article argues that a proper characterization of Murdoch’s view must regard her as developing a version of m. (shrink)

In this dissertation I argue that Murdoch’s philosophical-ethical project is best understood as an anti-Enlightenment genealogical narrative. I maintain that her work consistently displays four fundamental features that typify genealogical accounts: 1) liberation from a dominant philosophical picture; 2) restoration of a previous philosophical picture wrongly dismissed; 3) restoration of practices no longer intelligible on the dominant view; and 4) recovery of an alternative grammar at odds with the dominant philosophical discourse. The dominant philosophical picture Murdoch subverts is the eclipse (...) of consciousness wrought by both the Anglo-analytic and Continental-existentialist traditions. Whether effaced by totalizing linguistic structures or identified with an empty choosing will, Murdoch argues that the forces present within her philosophical context are fundamentally hostile to an adequate conception of consciousness. Her genealogical project attempts to reassert the primacy of consciousness within this antagonistic climate by restoring a Platonic, erotic conception of consciousness. Additionally, Murdoch insists that consciousness is the fundamental form of moral being and that moral transformation, including the practices for that transformation, cannot be understood without a thick conception of consciousness. Murdoch’s account, therefore, refocuses our attention on important practices or techniques of moral purification rendered unintelligible on the dominant view. Finally, Murdoch recovers the Platonic metaphor of the Good, including the conceptual array in which the Good receives its meaning, in an attempt to develop an alternative grammar fit for the task of picturing the complexities and nuances of our ethical situation. I conclude by commenting on both the promising and problematic aspects of Murdoch’s legacy. (shrink)

Although thick ethical concepts have been neglected in Murdochian scholarship, this article argues that they were central to the thought of Iris Murdoch. In the first section, the article provides a sustained account of thick ethical concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, demonstrating how these concepts align with and illuminate familiar aspects of her philosophical essays. The first section also explores the ways in which Murdoch's alternative account of moral concepts was at the heart of her overall attack on the noncognitivism of (...) her day. In the second section, the article provides a reading of The Black Prince and considers the ways that thick ethical concepts offer new insight into Murdoch's literary activity. It concludes by suggesting that studying Murdoch's philosophy and literature in light of thick ethical concepts reveals a deep unity between her two intellectual projects. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that narratives concerning Periclean Athens have mistakenly imposed modern conceptions of enlightenment onto the Greek world,and have therefore been blinded to crucial aspects of Socrates’s practice of moral reason giving. In contrast to the Kantian conception of enlightenment, which puts forth an image of the ideally enlightened person as an autonomous reasoner, one who refuses to be guided by another and who has the courage to throw off the chains of tradition and “think for oneself,” (...) I argue that Socrates provides us with a much different picture of the enlightened individual. Socrates’s practice of moral reasoning does not take the form of autonomous rationality that is antithetical to tradition, but rather his practice recognizes the rightful authority of tradition and custom in moral reason giving. Thus, rather than characterizing Socrates through a Kantian enlightenment reading, this paper argues that we should study Socrates through the lens of the sensus communis, a humanist concept articulated well by Giambattista Vico and Hans Georg-Gadamer. (shrink)