Have you always thought you could do with some expert guidance when reading Iris’s philosophy? Well help is at hand! This episode marks the start of a new mini-series of episodes where we’ll be reading Iris’s collected essay collection – Existentialists and Mystics – with a team of excellent academics and seasoned readers, and you can join us for the experience! Each episode will focus on a small number of essays – or perhaps just one essay if it is substantial in length – and explore exactly what Murdoch was up to and how the essay fits in with her overall vision. We’ll keep in roughly chronological order, starting with her work from the 1950s and ending up in the mid-1980s with her two Platonic dialogues. Although Existentialists and Mystics doesn’t contain all of her published philosophy it’s a great place to start so, if you’ve not got a copy, you can pick one up very reasonably second-hand via this link:

https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?isbn=9780140264920&st=xl&ac=qr

In this episode we’re starting out with her earliest material on Existentialism – closely reading ‘The Existentialist Hero’ and ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’ as well as her review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity – all from 1950. The two essays were originally given as talks on BBC Radio’s The Third Programme; and are the groundwork for her first monograph, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist that would be published just a few years later in 1953.

Joining Miles is Sam Filby, currently working on his PhD thesis on Murdoch at Northwestern University, Chicago; and the current recipient of the BSH research fund. His work focuses on Murdoch’s aesthetics and moral psychology