Iris Murdoch
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919 - 1999). In her lifetime she was most celebrated for her novels such as The Bell and The Black Prince, but these are now sharing the spotlight with her philosophy. Responding to the horrors of the Second World War, she argued that morality was not subjective or a matter of taste, as many of her contemporaries held, but was objective, and good was a fact we could recognize. To tell good from bad, though, we would need to see the world as it really is, not as we want to see it, and her novels are full of characters who are not yet enlightened enough to do that.
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Guests
- Anil Gomes
3 episodes
Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, University of Oxford -
Anne Rowe No other episodes
Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester and Emeritus Research Fellow with the Iris Murdoch Archive Project at Kingston University -
Miles Leeson No other episodes
Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre and Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester
Reading list
-
Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch
John Bayley (Duckworth, 1998) Google Books → -
Iris Murdoch, Philosopher
Justin Broackes (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 2014) Google Books → -
Why Iris Murdoch Matters
Gary Browning (Bloomsbury, 2018) Google Books → -
Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch
A.S. Byatt (Vintage, 1994) Google Books → -
Iris Murdoch: A Life
Peter J Conradi (HarperCollins, 2001) Google Books → -
Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist
Peter J. Conradi (HarperCollins, 2001) Google Books → -
A Writer at War: Iris Murdoch 1935-1945
Peter J. Conradi (Short Books, 2010) -
From A Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch
Gillian Dooley (ed.) (University of South Carolina Press, 2003) Google Books → -
The Murdochian Mind
Mark Hopwood and Silvia Panizza (eds.) (Routledge, forthcoming) Google Books → -
Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1939-1995
Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Chatto & Windus, 2015) -
Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life
Priscilla Martin and Anne Rowe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) Google Books → -
The Sovereignty of Good
Iris Murdoch (Routledge, 2001) Google Books → -
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
Iris Murdoch (Penguin, 1993) Google Books → -
Iris Murdoch: Writers and Their Work
Anne Rowe (Liverpool University Press, 2019) Google Books → -
Becoming Iris Murdoch
Frances White (Kingston University Press, 2014) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m0010q90
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0010q90
Auto-category: 100 (Philosophy)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. Iris Murdoch, 1919 to 1999, was seen in her lifetime as a novelist who was also a philosopher.