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.