Best-known for her novels and longer philosophical works, Iris Murdoch was also a brilliant essayist, and produced classic pieces on a wide range of philosophical and literary subjects. Through essays such as 'Existentialists and Mystics' she helped to create a new climate of thought in the post-war years, by bringing existentialism to British consciousness, and subjecting it to rigorous criticism. She has also contributed her own original philosophical thought, in the fields of metaphisics and moral philosophy. But until now her essays have been, at best, scattered in anthologies and periodicals. This collection, edited by Murdoch scholar Peter Conradi, brings them together in one volume. It includes classics such as 'Against Dryness' her influential polemic on fiction and philosophy; and key evaluations of the thinking of T. S. Eliot, Simone Weil, Satre and de Beauvoir and Elias Canetti. EXISTENTIALISTS AND MYSTICS is a brilliant, enlightening and accessible volume from one of the greatest, most impassioned intellects of our time.
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Iris Murdoch is a poet, philosopher, novelist, and playwright, and in this collection of her most careful thinking and writing on the relationship between art and philosophy, we are treated to the fruits of decades of good work. Murdoch's changing ideas about the search for meaning in literature and life lead us down a richly rewarding path. Along the way she discusses T. S. Eliot, Dante Alighieri, Matthew Arnold, and many other major literary figures. For cognitive power, a sweeping overview of Western thought and art, and a respectful engagement with the reader, put it on the shelf beside the collected works of Kenneth Burke.
--This text refers to an alternate
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From Library Journal
Most readers think of Murdoch first as a novelist, but as this excellent anthology makes clear, she is an outstanding philosopher as well. After World War II, she established herself as an authority on existentialism, though she did not herself accept this doctrine, viewing it as stressing human autonomy to an undue degree. She locates a similar failing in much contemporary analytic moral philosophy. Instead, she thinks of values as objective: human beings contemplate them rather than create them. Her philosophy culminates in a nontheistic mysticism bearing strong affinities to Plato. The best introduction available to an important and unusual thinker; for all academic and most public libraries.?David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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Some great philosophers have been also great writers in the sense of great literary artists - I suppose the outstanding examples are Plato, St Augustine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Some great philosophers have been also great writers in the sense of great literary artists - I suppose the outstanding examples are Plato, St Augustine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Except for Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, which is disorganized and verges on the incoherent, almost all of Murdoch's explicitly philosophical writing is here. So if you are going to be working on Murdoch's philosophy, this is a resource you need to have. However, if you're new to Murdoch's philosophical writing, you might do better taking a look at The Sovereignty of Good; it's got three of her best four essays, and it's a whole lot shorter and easier to find your way around in.
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47 of 48 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Almost all of Murdoch's philosophizing in a single package
July 4 2000
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Except for Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, which is disorganized and verges on the incoherent, almost all of Murdoch's explicitly philosophical writing is here. So if you are going to be working on Murdoch's philosophy, this is a resource you need to have. However, if you're new to Murdoch's philosophical writing, you might do better taking a look at The Sovereignty of Good; it's got three of her best four essays, and it's a whole lot shorter and easier to find your way around in.
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Re-Affirming a Canon
April 27 2000
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
Murdoch's essays each shine on their own, but collected here you get the full, accumulated brilliance in one volume. She is a needed voice in the post-modernist wilderness --- assuring the careful reader that there are works, though they may be formalist or outmoded or dated, that are worthy of the veneration and study of future generations. And, just as there are works of art that are "good" and that are superior to others, there are also actions and thoughts and moralities that are better than others. Her style is lucid and affecting and is never pedantic --- you are enthralled and rapt while you are being educated. Literature, like the other arts, is a form of communication that never ends. Art speaks to each generation; but some specific works of art transcend time and are contemplated anew by different human minds. Murdoch takes your chin and points your eyes towards these works, and you can see the eternal verities and the truths that shine out from them.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Clear enough for the moment
Mar 30 2010
By Bruce P. Barten
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
I don't read this book often. It has a few dialogues at the end that cling to the issues identified by Plato in a society largely shaped by dramatic appreciation of entertainment values and perverse insight. I don't get much from darmatic readings. A literary life is good training for competence in the kinds of things I think about, so Iris Murdoch deserves to be known by those who read and would like to know about what they are reading. Part Four of this book is called: The Need for Theory, 1956-66. I thought I would be interested in a chapter called:
Mass, Might and Myth
and I was delighted to discover that it was a review published in 1962 of the book Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. She praises Canetti for calling Christianity "a religion of lament." (p. 190). By providing new concepts for the behaviors that create vicious circles in our lives, "He has also shown, in ways which seem to me entirely fresh, the interaction of `the mythical' with the ordinary stuff of human life. The mythical is not something`extra'; we live in myth and symbol all the time." (p. 191). "Rich concepts have histories." (p. 190). The interaction of various intellectual approaches is probably dying out in a nation of shoppers, but books like this are still for sale for those who want them.
Mass, Might and Myth
and I was delighted to discover that it was a review published in 1962 of the book Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. She praises Canetti for calling Christianity "a religion of lament." (p. 190). By providing new concepts for the behaviors that create vicious circles in our lives, "He has also shown, in ways which seem to me entirely fresh, the interaction of `the mythical' with the ordinary stuff of human life. The mythical is not something`extra'; we live in myth and symbol all the time." (p. 191). "Rich concepts have histories." (p. 190). The interaction of various intellectual approaches is probably dying out in a nation of shoppers, but books like this are still for sale for those who want them.
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