Description
Book SynopsisBest known as the author of twenty-six novels,
Iris Murdoch has also made significant contributions to the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays. Tracing Murdoch's journey to a modern Platonism, this volume includes incisive evaluations of the thought and writings of
T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvior, and
Elias Canetti, as well as key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, on the concept of love, and the role great literature can play in curing the ills of philosophy.
Existentialists and Mystics not only illuminates the mysticism and intellectual underpinnings of Murdoch's novels, but confirms her major contributions to twentieth-century thought.
Trade Review"Brilliantly readable . . . Murdoch can make the most demanding questions of life accessible and exciting." —
The Baltimore Sun"
Existentialists and Mystics desribes the intellectual journey of a lifetime. This book is Murdoch's key. Readers will find much here to stimulate, entertain and edify. No one conveys the beauty and excitement of philosophy better than Murdoch." —Hilary Spurling,
Daily Telegraph"Murdoch, a wondrous writer and a careful student of the history of thought, is endowed a rare talent for philosophical writing—she offers, in accessible prose, insight into some of the great questoins that have preoccupied thinkers for centuries." —
San Diego Union "Tight, graceful writing, and a pleasure to read . . . [Murdoch's moral theory] has a real claim to our attention." —Elijah Millgram,
The Boston Review "A perceptive investigation into the symbiotic relationship of philosophy and literature." —
The GuardianTable of ContentsPart 1 Prologue: literature and philosophy - a conversation with Bryan Magee. Part 2 Nostalgia for the particular, 1951-57: thinking and language; nostalgia for the particular; metaphysics and ethics; vision and choice in morality. Part 3 Encountering existentialism, 1950-59: the novelist as metaphysician; the existentialist hero; Sartre's "The Emotions - Outline of a Theory"; De Beauvoir's "The Ethics of Ambiguity"; the image of mind; the existentialist political myth; Hegel in modern dress; existentialist bite. Part 4 The need for theory. 1956-66: knowing the void; T.S. Eliot as a moralist; a house of theory; mass, might and myth; the darkness of practical reason. Part 5 Towards a practical mysticism, 1959-78: the sublime and the good; existentialists and mystics; salvation by words; art is the limitation of nature. Part 6 Can literature help cure the ills of philosophy? 1959-61: the sublime and the beautiful revisited against dryness. Part 7 Re-reading Plato, 1964-86: the idea of perfection; on "God" and "good"; the sovereignty of good over other concepts; the fire and the sun - why Plato banished the artists; art and Eros - a dialogue about art; above the gods - a dialogue about religion.
