Introduction: Art, Morals and ‘The Discovery of Reality’

Abstract

Iris Murdoch’s insistence on the indissoluble link between art and morals is the underlying reason for the current renaissance in Murdoch studies. This volume is one of its progeny and illustrates the seriousness with which Iris Murdoch’s work is now being taken by moral philosophers, theorists of the novel, contemporary writers and theologians. Indeed her novels, literary theory, moral philosophy and theological beliefs are frequently referenced in ‘ethical turn’ criticism which has itself changed the face of literary criticism over the past ten years. Her work has sparked such interest because of her unique position as a working moral philosopher and practising novelist whose fiction tests and contests the moral stances to which she commits herself in her philosophical essays (despite the fact that she said repeatedly that she did not want philosophy to intrude into her fictional writing). Thus her novels do not function as mere illustrations of her moral philosophy but as meditations on, and counterpoints to, the positions she puts forward there. Her fears about the decline of religious faith in the West were not only related to the denial of a personal God (a position to which she herself subscribed), but also to an anxiety that a wholly secular society would no longer actively encourage quiet reflection on abstract matters such as truth, freedom, morality and the nature of goodness and evil.KeywordsMoral PhilosophyLiterary CriticismLiterary TheorySecular SocietyMoral StanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.