Iris Murdoch

Fellow, St Anne’s College, Oxford

Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

In her series of lectures, Murdoch presents an intriguing, scholarly, and sprawling work that moves reflectively through an enormous range of topics including art and religion, morals and politics, Wittgenstein, metaphysics, deconstruction, Schopenhauer, imagination, and Martin Buber. She presents ‘a huge hall of reflection full of light and space and fresh air, in which ideas and intuitions can be unsystematically nurtured’. She raises anew the question of metaphysics and its relationship to ethics.

Biography

Jean Iris Murdoch was born on 15 July 1919 in Dublin. Made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to literature, Under the Net (1954) was in Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels. During the Second World War, she was Assistant Principal to the Treasury before joining the UNRRA. In 1946, she was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship, but her declaration as a Communist prevented her from entering the US. Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford in 1948, she was made Lecturer at the Royal College of Art in 1963. 

Awarded the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea in 1978, she gave the Leslie Stephen Lecture in 1967, later published as The Sovereignty of Good (1970). Best known for her novels on good and evil, sexuality, morality, and the power of the unconscious, her achievements shaped English scholarship for nearly half a century. Other works include The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good (1968), Henry and Cato (1976), and The Message to the Planet (1989). 

Published/Archival Resources