- Paperback: 576 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (30 Sep 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140264922
- ISBN-13: 978-0140264920
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.9 x 3.5 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 483,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Product Description
Best known as the author of 26 novels, Iris Murdoch was also an accomplished essayist and critic who taught philosophy for many years at Oxford University. This work gathers for the first time in one volume her most influential essays and shorter pieces. Included are her major critiques of existentialism written in the 1950s, her two Platonic dialogues on art and religion, incisive evaluations of the writings of T.S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Bauvoir, and Elias Canetti, as well as key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, on the concept of love, and of the role great literature can play in curing the ills of philosophy. This volume confirms Iris Murdoch's major contributions to the literature and thought of the 20th century.
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4 reviews
43 of 44 people found the following review helpful
Almost all of Murdoch's philosophizing in a single package
5 July 2000
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.
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Re-Affirming a Canon
27 April 2000
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.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Clear enough for the moment
30 Mar 2010
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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