Murdoch’s Diagnosis

This chapter traces Iris Murdoch’s philosophical development and the contributions she made to the school of thought shaped by herself, Anscombe, Midgley, and Foot, before she left academic philosophy for the literary world. Murdoch’s embrace of existentialism was short-lived, but her knowledge of continental philosophy helped her to “diagnose” that French existentialists and British linguistic philosophers shared a faulty world-picture. They saw humanity as alone in a value-free universe, choosing principles and imposing meaning at will. Nonetheless, these thinkers covertly and inconsistently implied that there are superior ways of facing this reality. Murdoch had learned from Wittgenstein that pictures can be limiting; to her, contemporary philosophy appeared enslaved by its world-picture. She had learned—through crises in her personal life, including in her relationships with MacKinnon and Anscombe—to see ethical growth as a matter of building habits, rather than of isolated choices.