Blog Archives - Page 3 of 5 - The Iris Murdoch Society

‘A Resolute Reading of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals’, Evgenia Mylonaki and Megan Laverty

9 February 2023By Megan LavertyBlog

We met at a previous Iris Murdoch conference. We both had papers at the conference, in 2019. We discovered that we share a mutual love of Murdoch as a philosopher and that there was some kinship and affinity in the themes of our papers and so we came up with the proposal to read something by Murdoch that is challenging to read on your own. Thus, we set out to read Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals together.

Reading Iris. All of it.

8 December 2022By Christopher BoddingtonBlog

I looked out Under the Net from our bookcase and found a lovely old Penguin with Margaret Foreman’s beautiful painting of Jake in his chair. I was captivated again and found we had The Bell, The Nice and the Good and about four or five more. I had to read all of them and then, being something of a completist, had to read the rest of the novels, most of which I had never heard of or seen in print.

Collecting Iris Murdoch: The Fiction

28 November 2022By Miles LeesonBlog

Serious book collecting isn’t the draw it was for earlier generations, and the biggest prices are still attached to the works of the canonical dead white males (although Dickens can be surprisingly cheap), making Murdoch and some of her contemporaries viable and reasonable to collect. So how do you go about starting a collection of Murdoch’s works? Where do you find them? And, crucially, how much should you pay?

Essays on Ethics and Culture

8 November 2022By Sabina LovibondBlog

This collection includes four essays dealing directly with the writings of Iris Murdoch and reflecting work of my own from the years 2015-20. The essays in question are ‘The Varieties of Attention’ (not previously published but presented to a conference at Queen Mary, University of London in 2017), ‘The Elusiveness of the Ethical: From Murdoch to Diamond’, ‘Post-Existentialist Moments: Murdoch and Highsmith’, and ‘Iris Murdoch and the Quality of Consciousness’.

BSH Fund Fellow 2023 – Camille Braune

20 October 2022By Camille BrauneBlog

My research is part of the continuity, renewal and improvement of Franco-British studies on Iris Murdoch to date, in a common literary, philosophical, and ethical movement. My thesis intends to propound a new ethics of attention to language as a singular moral project, which Murdoch intuited in her first writings.

The latest Iris Murdoch Review, no. 13 (2022)

30 September 2022By Miles LeesonBlog

The 2022 Iris Murdoch Review places Murdoch in dialogue with contemporary novelists and philosophers whose views put her beliefs into sharp relief and develop conversations that have been ongoing since Murdoch’s centenary in 2019.

Iris Murdoch’s Beermats: A Unique Literary Collection

6 July 2022By Anne RoweBlog

Murdoch’s beer mats point the way to how some of the most dramatic moments of her life were played out in pubs, as indeed they are for many characters in her novels. The names of scores of pubs lie within their pages, for it is to pubs that characters go to weep, to quarrel, to think, to hope, and often to come to conclusions that will destroy their lives.

Iris Murdoch: Music, Sounds and Silences

6 June 2022By Gillian DooleyBlog

What happens when we deliberately try listening to Murdoch’s novels? What can be gained by attending not just to the social, moral, emotional and visual worlds she creates, but also to the aural worlds in her work?

A Murdochian Metaethics

10 January 2022By Cathy MasonBlog

An account of the second-order commitments on the nature of the ethical realm that underlie Murdoch’s thinking. In developing this systematic framework, I hope to shed light on various long-standing problems for contemporary moral philosophy regarding the nature of moral knowledge, moral motivation and moral objectivity.

BSH Fund Fellow 2022 – Michela Dianetti

9 November 2021By Michela DianettiBlog

My PhD thesis is the first to compare the narrative works of Iris Murdoch and Elsa Morante. Its principal aim is to highlight the crucial influence Simone Weil’s philosophy had on the two authors, especially Weil’s idea of affliction.

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