Philosophical Reviews – University of Notre Dame

 

Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of her Romantic Vision

Megan Laverty, Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of her Romantic Vision, Continuum, 2007, 134pp., $144.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780826485359.

Reviewed by Christopher Cordner, University of Melbourne

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Modern moral philosophy has followed in Aristotle’s footsteps not Plato’s. Aristotle highlights ‘the virtues’. By highlighting love and the good, Iris Murdoch once again brought Platonic ideas alive, making them accessible in a contemporary idiom.

This bent of her philosophy is, I am sure, one reason it has so engaged people, but perhaps it is also why so few of the philosophers who have expressed their indebtedness to Murdoch’s moral philosophy have written directly about it. Contemporary analytic philosophy still resists, or perhaps just has not been able to find its own words for, what Murdoch had to say as a philosopher.

Megan Laverty describes her book as not aiming ‘to replicate Murdoch’s ideas’ (12), but as ‘an exercise in methodological mimesis or iteration’ (12). What she writes will be ‘a way of “going on” with Murdoch’s concepts or terms’ (12) rather than an analysis of them. Laverty situates Murdoch within the tradition of what (following Nikolas Kompridis) she calls ‘philosophical romanticism’ (2). She says that the ‘authority of Murdoch’s philosophy . . . is given by its location in, and its ability to comment on, a larger philosophical tradition, in this case romantic’ (2). This is a bold move, given Murdoch’s criticisms of romanticism, which Laverty brings out. But Laverty also reminds us that for Murdoch Plato was one of ‘the great romantics’ (7). [I find it interesting that Plato, who banned poets from his Utopia, is one of the West's great poets. Anyone with an extra $144 should pick this book up!]

Megan Laverty – Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of her Romantic Vision – Reviewed by Christopher Cordner, University of Melbourne – Philosophical Reviews – University of Notre Dame