Dissertation Abstract: This thesis examines the relationship between moral philosophy and criticism in the thought of Iris Murdoch. While Murdoch’s philosophy and novels have received extensive scholarly attention, her reflections on criticism — conceived here as a broad, semi-independent branch of literature encompassing art, literature, and culture more generally — have been largely neglected.
The project reconstructs Murdoch’s understanding of criticism, which recurs as a theme throughout Murdoch’s thought. It argues that criticism, occupying a distinctive position between aesthetics and literature but reducible to neither, shares the central concerns of moral philosophy: it is an inherently evaluative activity concerned with judgment, truth, and the Good.
Critical judgments necessarily embody assumptions about the nature and value of particular objects, including implicit moral and metaphysical commitments, even when the critic explicitly denies them. The project therefore investigates what Murdoch calls the ‘schemes of concepts’ through which critics approach and respond to works of culture, paying particular attention to the two thinkers of criticism who receive the most sustained treatment from Murdoch: T.S. Eliot and Jacques Derrida.
Ultimately, the research asks what Murdoch’s concept of ‘moral vision’ might contribute to criticism. It proposes that, for Murdoch, criticism is a form of attentive moral vision: a disciplined, anti-systematic activity of learning to ‘see more’, to see things as they really are.