Iris Murdoch 1919 – 1999

Iris Murdoch was a 20th-century British philosopher and novelist, the author of 26 novels and several volumes of moral philosophy. Her philosophical work, including The Sovereignty of Good and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, defended a Platonic moral realism in which attention to other persons and to the good is the central ethical task. She held that the moral life is a continuous process of perception and reorientation rather than a series of discrete decisions. Her novels, including The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978, dramatise the same themes through complex characters and ethical predicaments. She taught philosophy at Oxford for many years and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987.

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was an Irish-British philosopher and novelist whose moral philosophy is one of the most distinctive in twentieth-century Anglophone thought. Born in Dublin and raised in London, she studied classics at Oxford, briefly joined the Communist Party, worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration after the war, and became fellow and tutor in philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford in 1948.

Murdoch's philosophical work — much of it collected in The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) — argues against what she takes to be the dominant Anglophone tendency to treat moral philosophy as a matter of will, choice, and rule. For Murdoch, the moral life is centrally a matter of attention: the disciplined effort to see particular persons and situations clearly, free from the distortions of the fat relentless ego. She drew on Plato, Simone Weil, and the Christian mystical tradition while remaining philosophically committed to a chastened metaphysical realism about goodness.

Murdoch was also one of the major British novelists of the postwar period, with twenty-six novels including Under the Net, The Sea, the Sea (which won the Booker Prize in 1978), and The Black Prince. The relation between her philosophy and her fiction is unusually close. She died of Alzheimer's disease in 1999, the subject of her husband John Bayley's late memoir.