What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist?–Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Metaphor

Hämäläinen, Nora

doi:10.1080/05568641.2014.932957

Cited by 14 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…That is, an outer conversation can co-exist and influence an inner conversation and vice-versa without implying a mysterious “ghost in the machine” that lies behind the outer conversation. Regardless of the accuracy of this critique, which is contested, Hämäläinen (2014) makes the comment that one of the unfortunate legacies of Wittgenstein’s work, from Murdoch’s perspective on the aesthetic and ethical life, has been an overcautiousness of the inner world; along with an overdone fear of Cartesiansism.…”

Section: How To Categorise Discursive Materials In Social Psychology?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nietzsche or Aristotle: The implications for social psychology

Sullivan

2016

Theory & Psychology

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YesIn this article, I argue that there is a divide in social psychology between a mainstream paradigm for investigating the flow of power in a largely competitive social life (such as social cognition, social identity theory, and discourse analysis) and a fringe paradigm for investigating the experience of flourishing in conditions of social learning (such as ‘the community of practice metaphor’, ‘dialogical theory’, ‘phenomenological analysis’). Assumptions of power and flourishing demand different conceptions of the self and the social world (e.g. a strategic subject or motivated tactician in a social group versus a reflective learner/artist in a community of practice). The first goal of this article is to reveal the assumptions that lead to this new classification. The second goal is to draw dotted lines to the blind-spots within these paradigms that each reveals. These blind spots are: 1) internal goods could be useful to consider for the power paradigm and external goods for the flourishing paradigm; 2) communicative rationality is underplayed within the power paradigm; while instrumental rationality is underplayed for the flourishing paradigm; 3) judgements and skill are underplayed in the power paradigm; self-interested motivations are underplayed in the flourishing paradigm

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Section: How To Categorise Discursive Materials In Social Psychology?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nietzsche or Aristotle: The implications for social psychology

Sullivan

2016

Theory & Psychology

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“…We will end with a confused framing of ourselves and our world and our knowledge of both, if we think of ourselves as rational through and through and of the world as fully transparent and accessible by means of more or less neutral observations. Many of us have been taught that Platonism is a form of other‐worldly philosophy that posits a perfect knowledge of perfect things; this is the opposite of Murdoch's view …”

Section: Perfection?mentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Conception of Original Sin?

Forsberg

2014

The Heythrop Journal

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“…Much less than one would like has been written on ‘Murdoch's Wittgenstein’. For exceptions, see Mac Cumhaill, () in this volume; Hämäläinen, ; Forsberg, .…”

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“…30 ENDNOTES 1 Much less than one would like has been written on 'Murdoch's Wittgenstein'. For exceptions, see Mac Cumhaill, (2020) in this volume; Hämäläinen, 2014;Forsberg, 2013. 2 In her earlier writing, she is more inclined to limit her disagreement to Wittgenstein's followers, while Wittgenstein himself 'remains sphinx-like in the background (IP 311).…”

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confidence: 99%

What if the private linguist were a poet? Iris Murdoch on privacy and ethics

Wiseman

2020

European J of Philosophy

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The historical individual, or rather the absence of the historical individual, in modern philosophy is at the centre of the three lectures collected in The Sovereignty of Good and at the centre of Murdoch's moral philosophy taken as a whole. Murdoch is driven by the insight, and the anxiety, that the conceptual resources available to moral philosophy are catastrophically diminished by a picture of the human individual as 'an isolated principle of will, or burrowing pinpoint of consciousness, inside, or beside, a lump of being which has been handed over to other disciplines' (GG 338).Though her contemporaries might not recognise this rather grotesque character as the hero of their philosophy, Murdoch believes that the presence of this 'soul-picture' in their work is betrayed by the anaemic character of the moral scene they describe. Such a soul-picture, Murdoch argues, has left ethicists with the resources to speak only of reasonableness, rationality, authenticity, sincerity and correctness and has transformed moral progress from a demanding personal struggle towards unachievable perfection into a 'mediocre achievement' (GG 340) consisting in 'the making of sensible choices and the giving of sensible and simple reasons' (HT 177; GG 340; SG 364).Murdoch argues that moral philosophy must be able speak in terms of good and evil, piety and salvation, humility and love-concepts that are connected to perfection, not mediocracy-and she thinks that these concepts get application only against a background picture of humans as substantive individuals or selves, each with a personal history, and a rich, unique, and ultimately private, inner life (e.g., GG 343). She proposes such a soul-picture, one that foregrounds the privacy of individual consciousness and links both practical rationality and the moral significance of action to the irreducible particularity of 'an individual living in time' (MGM 273). This soul-picture, Murdoch thinks, will allow us to recognise that 'the area of morals, and ergo of moral philosophy [is not a] hole-and-corner matter of debts and promises, but [covers] the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world' (SG 380) Abbreviations: GG, 'On "God" and "Good"'.

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What is a Wittgensteinian Neo-Platonist?–Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Metaphor

Cited by 14 publications

References 10 publications

Nietzsche or Aristotle: The implications for social psychology

Nietzsche or Aristotle: The implications for social psychology

A New Conception of Original Sin?

What if the private linguist were a poet? Iris Murdoch on privacy and ethics

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