Did Iris Murdoch BETRAY or BEDECK philosophic understanding and advancement?
- UNDECIDED: Iris WHO?
- BETRAYED: Novels? Isn’t that rather like Joan Sutherland doing musical theatre?
- BEDECKED: She showed the applicability of philosophy to 20th Century life, and on, through her characters.
I JUST discovered “your” existence and am thrilled to join your ranks. Truly. My first post is a question, just in search of my own “kind.” I personally rank the paragons of greatest human understanding and thought this way: Plato, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Iris Murdoch. I’m likely to be jumped by thugs for including the even-numbered entrants of these 4. Yet I strongly believe that any approach to philosophy which does not begin and place its most unstinting emphasis upon the individual (and work upwards from there) puts the cart before the ox. I include the Bard and the Dame because I have yet to encounter two humans who understood humans so broadly and deeply. What Shakespeare did for Elizabethean England, Dame Iris has done for next 500 years, in my view.
Any other subscribers to the Love of Iris ??? – that’s the club to which, so far as I can tell, I am the sole member.
At all events, I look very forward to learning with and from each and all!