A escolha e a visão

Iris Murdoch e o existencialismo

Abstract

In 1953, Iris Murdoch published the first book in English devoted to expounding the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. If at first she saw in existentialism a reinvigorating philosophy—a counterpoint to the strictures of the philosophical training she had received at Oxford under the influence of A. J. Ayer’s logical positivism—she gradually discerned in the moral philosophy laid out in L’existentialisme est un humanisme an underlying affinity with the moral philosophy emerging in Britain in the work of R. M. Hare. Under the generic heading of “existentialism,” she then developed a broad diagnosis of the failings of moral philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and, on that basis, began to sketch an alternative vision which, however, she never brought to completion, leaving philosophy to devote herself to literature in the early 1960s.