Literary Systems TheoryThere is a style of English philosophy which I find impenetrable. I understand the individual words, the import of the sentences, and (mostly) the thrust of the paragraphs. Yet I clearly fail to get the point of the whole. Murdoch, in this her most famous philosophical work, presents an example of my difficulty.There is no doubt about Murdoch’s erudition, nor about her literary cogency. But the whole of Metaphysics reads like fragments of a private conversation which the r...

[A conference room somewhere in California. On the far side of the table, SERGEI BRIN and LARRY PAGE. Enter IRIS MURDOCH]PAGE: Welcome to the Googleplex, Iris.MURDOCH: I-- What--BRIN: Don't worry. The disorientation is entirely normal. It'll wear off soon.MURDOCH: But how-- I mean, a minute ago I was--PAGE: Let's just say it's an experimental technique we've been developing. I'm sure you won't be interested in the details, you've always been more concerned with the big picture. Why don't we disc...

Murdoch presents a history of philosophy seen through the lens of the idea of unity, which emerges as the core idea of philosophy. She presents philosophy as an effort to conceive the unity in difference that is the real. She shows that every philosophy implies a metaphysics, which takes one of two main forms: it can either be an extended effort to present a synoptic vision of the unity of things, grasped through the unity of the individual personality (constructive metaphysics), or else it can

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals presents the story of Philosophy as the story of a kind of Art ('Art launches philosophy'), as an attempt to imagine (key Murdoch word) the world in which we find ourselves. A similarly ambitious narrative is Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, but whereas Russell is often concerned to find the logical error in a philosophical vision, Murdoch asks whether it is true to life. Russell's guiding question allows for complications of historical detail bu...

This book is hands down the second most important work in metaphysics in the last 200 years. The 1st most important work is Whitehead's "Process and Reality;" taken together, the "200" year frame is quite possibly overly conservative.Murdoch does not present us with a metaphysical "theory." Rather, she presents a comprehensive argument about the nature and purpose of metaphysical *inquiry*. It is impossible to overstate the significance of such a shift in emphasis.Murdoch carefully leads the rea...

Basically Murdoch's reading notes from her entire life... 500 pages of aphorisms. It took me something like 6 months and 40+ pages of notes to read it. A cogent organized argument throughout? No. Brilliant? Yes. And by the end the reader cannot have any doubt as to what she means to have said. I would rate this as one of the best things on ethics I have ever read and one of the best books I have ever read, but it's difficult to recommend because there's no getting away from the fact that it is a...

I couldn't recommend this book to anyone. It has become quickly dated in the three decades since first presented as lectures in 1982, and would perhaps offend people younger than myself. With that said, it remains a text that brought back to me why I read philosophy, which I somewhat needed when I took it down from my bookshelf. There's no doubt of the broad grasp of her readings and she particularly reawakened in me the lure of Schopenhauer,who is complimented for being one of the few philosoph...

An awesome and spectacular erudition of a first-rate thinker and novelist, Iris Murdoch writes with great wisdom and understanding about philosophy, ethics, literature, and religion in a conversational tone that has more clarity than a formal academic treatise. I go back time after time to re-read and gauge the depth of her insight into the kind of classical knowledge that integrates being and thinking with insights and arguments that really matter and are important to us. Though claiming not to...

Didn`t understand a word.

And I need a guide, 'cause I'm a morally turpitudinous bastard—just today, I ignored the cries to hold the elevator from some poor schlep scooting along with an armload of groceries. Wee-hah! Take the stairs or wait your turn, motherfucker!*This little plumper is actually quite good—clear and graceful writing backed up by an impressively learned grasp of an immensely complex subject. It'll prolly take me some time to saunter through, but I firmly believe it will prove to be worth it. Several rev...

I gave a lot of time to this book, both reading it and deferring my review while thinking about it. I normally write reviews within a day and just put down my first reactions and, despite the time taken, that is probably the only way I can review this book. My fantasy about Murdoch is this - that she has taught philosophy at a leading university for many years, associating with many leading philosophers and many students of whom some at least were very bright, and that she has developed a weary

I have the idea, along with one or two other commentators here, that this is the most important book of the 20th century. It’s also so intelligent and prodigiously well-informed as to be above the smaller minds of most of us, covering as it does the whole of Western philosophy and insisting in the Platonic spirit on the truth of ‘value’ above ‘fact’. It might be almost unreadable, even on second time, were it not for Murdoch’s elegant, clear-sightedly benign and often charming (which she would c...

What is the nature of good and why is art more often concerned with evil? Where do the realms of religion, morality, and philosophy overlap? What can we still learn from Plato? What are the limits of Derrida? How does art manifest an idea in a way that straight-on philosophy cannot? Iris Murdoch raises a lot of questions in this stimulating tome which clearly shows a greater allegiance to Simone Weill, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche than Kant, Wittgenstein and Buber and I'm more than fine with that....

A sprawling compendium of ideas, notes and essays that reflect her thoughts and reading. A guide to morals? No. A fascinating commentary on the people, books and ideas that affected her, whilst still holding on to the idea of the power of a transcendent good.

Murdoch says Plato says goodness cannot be expressed or represented in art because it caters for the lowest part of the soul which is to be contrasted with anamnesis, the good unconscious, presumably as recollected since that’s what the word means. Anamnesis seems to be realising what you knew unconsciously. I recollected ‘the book’, composed by my man who instigated its recollection, as also ‘An instance from which telepathy can be proved etc.’ the latter after he’d told me what he was ie my un...

Where to begin with the many, many things that are wrong with this book... First, Murdoch willfully misreads Derrida as a "structuralist," which he is not (though his thinking is, in part, descended from structuralism), and then equating structuralism with marxism (marxism is not structuralist int he same way that Derrida is (by Murdoch's definition)). Second, her eurocentric--actually ANGLO-centric--assumptions about culture. All peoples do not see the world as the English do (thank God) and, t...

This book is not a particularly unified argument, nor are the individual arguments within the chapters easy to follow. The chapters cover a wide variety of topics and thinkers, and Murdoch has a tendency to go on tangents that frequently disconnected from any wider argument. Additionally, in several sections she spends a bit more time refereeing between different thinkers without actually go too far in depth into her own views. That being said, if you have read her other works, this is a worthwh...

A delicious wander through the highest and most noble ideas of mainly European philosophers, from Kant to Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein to Derrida. But anchored in Murdoch's favourite Plato. This is Murdoch at her peak, and late in her life just before her crystal-clear mind was ravaged by dementia. In this work she searches for an answer to the question: now that religion has lost its authority, is there anything transcendental that can redeem and fulfil us as humans

Not light reading - but would like to re-read this now that I am a grown-up!

Added to read - before her novels.

For someone so obsessed with not being egocentric, she is talking an Aweful lot about herself. For example, she often says when and where she has read which philosopher. She read in her study time at Oxford; Ayer and back then thought that Ayer was a genius. 10 years or so later, she read the book again, NB still in Oxford, and found out it was rather shallow. Interesting! Murdoch hates television, and she doesn’t like swimming pools. Real philosophers swim in real lakes. Plato must have been a

This is another book that I don’t know who to recommend it to.I bought it for the title. The topic is something I write about myself. It turns out the author was attracted to metaphysical realist and both of us found this pointing toward a moral foundation. The book was difficult for me to get into. I felt as though I had walked into a room with many conversations going on about art, theater, religion and philosophy in such a way that I found the atmosphere quite garbled. It took me until chapt...

This book took me months to read. It's difficult to review⁠—there's so much learning and engagement with all these Western philosophers. At times the Western philosophical tradition holds Murdoch back ⁠—she's bogged down by all these texts. The book would benefit from good editing. Some nights, the leisurely pace and the comfortable optimism and faith⁠—and it is faith⁠—in the persistence of the 'good' has a charm, especially in the grim days of late 2019-2020. In the end, it's Murdoch telling he...

Some bits were great, some were painful. Some chapters were just statement after short statement leaving me feeling disconnected, punctuated by one abstract consideration after another. Not a particularly easy read and went on and on in parts some of which were ludicrous but then like most of these books with gems that make it through. Some philosophers can really write, like Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer- this was more like Kant, convoluted and challenging. Glad I read it though definitely mad...

I know that 99% of philosophy is commentary, but Murdoch is an epitome of that tendency; I wasn't sure she had really made her own theoretical contributions/conclusions to the conversation about metaphysics until the last three chapters of this 500+-page volume. Some of the commentary itself seems glossy, particularly because she uses the phrase "mutatis mutandis" so frequently you wonder why she feels the need for so much equivocation. That said, the provocations in the last three chapters are

Iris Murdoch shares her immense insights into the world of philosophy in a large book (520pp. hardback) which is crammed with her responses to a number of philosophies. Crammed with both her immense knowledge but also crammed in a way that can be hard to digest, unless you have an existing understanding of the people to whom she reefers. But a good book, nonetheless.

Hmm probably above my thinking powers -I gave it four stars because of many ah-ha moments - on each page in fact - promptly forgotten - elusive - so I guess I'm just not that smart but do love to immerse myself - will pick it up again one day.

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Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is Iris Murdoch's most comprehensive contribution to philosophy, the discipline of her professional life as an Oxford tutor from 1948 to 1963. It is an attempt to articulate a deep unifying basis for her thoughts on art, morality and reality, an intellectual voyage that begins with a discussion of the powers of art and of different kinds of art (Chapters 1-5), continues with an investigation of the mind, of consciousness, thought, will, and imagination (Chapters