BASC70204 - The Sovereignty of Good: Novels and Essays of Iris Murdoch

Course Description

Please Note - Correction: this course deals ONLY with Murdoch's philosophical essays, not with her fiction (this time).

Instructors: Charles Thomas Elder and Amy Thomas Elder. “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion,” wrote Iris Murdoch. “The great task in life is to find reality.”Along with Simone Weil, Murdoch was the other great Platonist of the twentieth century, one who achieved a unique synthesis between classical metaphysical and moral philosophy (Plato), on the one side, and the dominant strains of modern thought (psychoanalysis, existentialism, Marxism, and analytic philosophy), on the other. In the end, for Murdoch as for Plato, everything converges on the good. “We have to learn what’s true and what’s real,” Murdoch writes, “and that is understanding and loving what’s good, that’s how everything teaches us, everything proves it—” For Murdoch, as for Plato, human life is a movement from falsity to truth, from unreality to the real. Nothing less is truly worthy of a human being. We will read three of Murdoch’s most striking philosophical essays from The Sovereignty of Good, together with sections from her own great Platonic dialogue, Acastos, and two of her essays on philosophy and literature. No background knowledge required. Course code: BASC70204 Philosophy

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