Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

Murdoch, Iris

ISBN 10: 0140172327 / ISBN 13: 9780140172324

Published by Penguin Books, 1994

About this Item

This book is a well used but readable copy. The spine of the book has some tearing.

Seller Inventory # RDV.0140172327.A

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140172327
• ISBN 13: 9780140172324
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

This guide to morals is the culmination of the author's lifetime of work in philosophy. The author is concerned with the humanistic part of the history of philosophy, Plato to structuralism, and how it bears on our thoughts and feelings about our lives, our moral lives. She shows how our conception of morality is bound up with and in our worlds, not separate from them, not values separated from facts. More particularly, the subject in its first part includes consciousness, the nature of reality, the self-freedom. In its second part the subject is a conception of morality as somehow bound up with and in our worlds, not separate from them, not values separated from facts. This enterprise of the book, and its title, recall Kant's great groundwork of metaphysic morals. It is not philosophy of any of the dominant kinds in the English language its subject-matter is grander and more elusive, and it is much more literary, allusive, historical and spiritual. There are also extended commentaries on particular philosophers, including Schopenhauer, as well as a section on art, and some reflections on the novel, none of them personal or about the author's novels.

About the Author

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry.