Introduction

Abstract

Extract The contents of this collection are for the most part more recent than those of my Essays on Ethics and Feminism (2015). So far as they involve commentary on specific philosophers, the main points of reference are (the later) Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch. That juxtaposition may at first sight appear rather unlikely: although Murdoch once described herself as a ‘Wittgensteinian neo-Platonist’,1 her attitude to the author of Philosophical Investigations was destined to evolve with the passage of time into something more suspicious or even hostile. However, since I have no ambition to weave the ideas of these two thinkers into any kind of unified system, I do not undertake to mediate between them. What the collection has to offer in this respect is simply a continuation of two largely independent lines of work which have occupied me since the turn of the century. Largely, but of course not entirely independent. The essays are drawn together in a more abstract way by a common interest in the lived experience of the socially situated individual, alert in some degree to the fact of his or her situated condition and perhaps to the possibilities offered by its discursive or artistic representation, but not necessarily enthusiastic about the current assortment of scripts on offer. The take their cue, or cues, from the kind of philosophy that practises an informal humanistic reflection on such experience,2 using a method broadly describable as phenomenological. The phenomena in question are those arising from our involvement in the ‘moral life’, though this term has to be stretched so as to cover the life of value-perception on one hand and that of practical reason, including political deliberation, on the other. That involvement, as recorded or interrogated here, shows a variety of faces to the world—more or less sceptical, more or less anxious, accessible in varying degrees to this or that incoming demand for a change of intellectual direction. But the common factor, I think, is a truth-orientated (so, not purely literary) study of our dealings with value—where ‘our’ remains indeterminate in historical scope (so, it may or may not be predominantly a question of the ‘human condition’ in contrast to the specific social condition of people alive here and now). And this truth-orientated study is one that consents to work from a position internal to the subject-matter on which it reflects, making do with just the conceptual and linguistic resources available (for example—as here) to ordinary, variously opinionated participants in moral, political, or aesthetic conversation.