Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals - Tapa blanda

"Remarkable--Iris Murdoch has once again put us all in her debt." --The New York Times Book Review "Anyone who has even the slightest interest in philosophical matters will find Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals an utterly absorbing book." --The Wall Street Journal "Lively, witty, and spellbinding, written by a sleuth on the trail of the meaning of Life." --Peter Mullen, The Daily Mail "Sets you daydreaming, captivates with a stream of thought, empowers with reminiscences." --London Review of Books "Gripping . . . Iris Murdoch has written a book which concerns all of us as human beings . . . There are pages here that one wants to embrace her for, pages that say things of fundamental human importance in a way that they have never quite been said before." --Noel Malcolm, The Sunday Telegraph "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is a prodigious roller coaster of a book, a journey through philosophy, religion, literature, art--less a guide than a gigantic survey, a mapping, providing readers with the means to find their own ways . . . I know of no other writer who could have covered such large areas with such authority, nor had the courage to treat fashion with such disdain." --Nicholas Mosley, The Daily Telegraph "A large, elaborate and visionary philosophical essay . . . richly stimulating . . . this is a significant book, lambent with insights, intelligence, and profound concern." --A. C. Grayling, The Financial Times "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is really a much needed Guide to Life. 'Good is the reality of which God is the dream' is a line of simple beauty, distilling philosophical insight into purest poetry." --Josephine Hart, The Sunday Express "It is a great congested work, a foaming sourcebook, about life, imagination, tragedy, philosophy, morality, religion, and art." --Galen Strawson, The Independent on Sunday

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.