Iris Murdoch. Existentialists and Mystics (Book Review)
citation_date
1998
Description
Three of the essays in this career-spanning collection make up Dame Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, a little classic which I regularly assign in my ethics courses. When I do, some of the students who have been impressed by it pick up one or another of her novels, and of those students, some, by now predictably, come back to ask whether the novel and the philosophical treatise are really by the same author. What my students are noticing is not simply the simultaneous living out of two rather different literary lives, but a problem in a unified project that we are at last in a position to understand as philosophical throughout, now that we have on hand a retrospective of Murdoch’s overtly philosophical work. Almost all of her short nonfiction is included, as well as two Socratic dialogs; with the sole exception of “The Fire and the Sun,” it is tight, graceful writing, and a pleasure to read.
Type
text;
citation_publisher
Boston Review
citation_volume
23
citation_issue
1
citation_firstpage
45
Citation_lastpage
46
citation_keywords
Philosophy; Book Review
Subject (LCSH)
Murdoch, Iris; Criticism
citation_language
eng
Bibliographic Citation
Millgram, E. (1998) Existentialists and Mystics (by) Iris Murdoch. Boston Review, 23(1), 45-6.
