Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature [Hardcover]

Iris Murdoch (Author), Peter Conradi (Editor), George Steiner (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1998

Collected here for the first time in one volume are Iris Murdoch's most influential pieces, spotlighting her brilliance as an essayist and critic. Included are her influential critiques of existentialism, written in the fifties, and her two Platonic dialogues on art nad religion; incisive evaluations of T.S. Elliot, Gabriel Marcel, Sartre, Elias Canetti, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, and Camus; and key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, the concept of love, and literature's role in curing the ills of philosophy. Existentialists and Mystics traces the genesis of one of the most impassioned intellects of our time - and her journey toward Platonism and the practical mysticism that permeates her novels.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Iris Murdoch is a poet, philosopher, novelist, and playwright, and in this collection of her most careful thinking and writing on the relationship between art and philosophy, we are treated to the fruits of decades of good work. Murdoch's changing ideas about the search for meaning in literature and life lead us down a richly rewarding path. Along the way she discusses T. S. Eliot, Dante Alighieri, Matthew Arnold, and many other major literary figures. For cognitive power, a sweeping overview of Western thought and art, and a respectful engagement with the reader, put it on the shelf beside the collected works of Kenneth Burke.

From Library Journal

Most readers think of Murdoch first as a novelist, but as this excellent anthology makes clear, she is an outstanding philosopher as well. After World War II, she established herself as an authority on existentialism, though she did not herself accept this doctrine, viewing it as stressing human autonomy to an undue degree. She locates a similar failing in much contemporary analytic moral philosophy. Instead, she thinks of values as objective: human beings contemplate them rather than create them. Her philosophy culminates in a nontheistic mysticism bearing strong affinities to Plato. The best introduction available to an important and unusual thinker; for all academic and most public libraries.?David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (January 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0713992255
• ISBN-13: 978-0713992250
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,907,009 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. In 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a fellow of St Anne's college.

Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year's Honours List. She died in February 1999.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost all of Murdoch's philosophizing in a single package, July 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Paperback)

Except for Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, which is disorganized and verges on the incoherent, almost all of Murdoch's explicitly philosophical writing is here. So if you are going to be working on Murdoch's philosophy, this is a resource you need to have. However, if you're new to Murdoch's philosophical writing, you might do better taking a look at The Sovereignty of Good; it's got three of her best four essays, and it's a whole lot shorter and easier to find your way around in.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Re-Affirming a Canon, April 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Hardcover)

Murdoch's essays each shine on their own, but collected here you get the full, accumulated brilliance in one volume. She is a needed voice in the post-modernist wilderness --- assuring the careful reader that there are works, though they may be formalist or outmoded or dated, that are worthy of the veneration and study of future generations. And, just as there are works of art that are "good" and that are superior to others, there are also actions and thoughts and moralities that are better than others. Her style is lucid and affecting and is never pedantic --- you are enthralled and rapt while you are being educated. Literature, like the other arts, is a form of communication that never ends. Art speaks to each generation; but some specific works of art transcend time and are contemplated anew by different human minds. Murdoch takes your chin and points your eyes towards these works, and you can see the eternal verities and the truths that shine out from them.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clear enough for the moment, March 30, 2010

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Paperback)

I don't read this book often. It has a few dialogues at the end that cling to the issues identified by Plato in a society largely shaped by dramatic appreciation of entertainment values and perverse insight. I don't get much from darmatic readings. A literary life is good training for competence in the kinds of things I think about, so Iris Murdoch deserves to be known by those who read and would like to know about what they are reading. Part Four of this book is called: The Need for Theory, 1956-66. I thought I would be interested in a chapter called:

Mass, Might and Myth

and I was delighted to discover that it was a review published in 1962 of the book Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. She praises Canetti for calling Christianity "a religion of lament." (p. 190). By providing new concepts for the behaviors that create vicious circles in our lives, "He has also shown, in ways which seem to me entirely fresh, the interaction of `the mythical' with the ordinary stuff of human life. The mythical is not something`extra'; we live in myth and symbol all the time." (p. 191). "Rich concepts have histories." (p. 190). The interaction of various intellectual approaches is probably dying out in a nation of shoppers, but books like this are still for sale for those who want them.