Posters

‘One might also ask the not uninteresting question whether Plato may not have been in some ways right to be so suspicious of art.’ (The Fire and the Sun, p. 4)

In 2003, after finishing our translation of Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good into Dutch (Over God en het Goede, Amsterdam: Boom), we presented a (fictional) dialogue between Murdoch, John Bayley and two of their friends (Altorf & Willemsen, Amsterdam, 23 September 2003, unpublished). The form suggested itself: years of intensive and detailed engagement with the text had left us with several questions and problems. It was time for a conversation with the author. 

This year, on completing our Dutch translation of The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (first published 1977) we propose to do the same, this time through an interactive poster presentation, encouraging our audience to contribute to the conversation. Murdoch’s essay on Plato and art invites dialogical reflections, not only on a historical question (‘why did Plato banish the artists?’), but also on our daily lives, on matters of truth, opinion, falsehood and deception.

This poster will present Iris Murdoch’s thinking about film in her essay on the Cinema from British Vogue in 1956. The poster will illustrate and explain Murdoch’s ideas about film and demonstrate the links with contemporary film phenomenology. Using still images from the films Murdoch discusses, and linking them to ideas in current film phenomenological thinking, the poster will demonstrate that Murdoch was an early film phenomenologist, and that her understanding of the specific powers and abilities of cinema was both acutely observed and prescient.

My doctoral research aims to explore the influence of Iris Murdoch in the flourishing of a new contemporary ordinary ethics, embracing both the concepts of attention to language, as a profound ground of moral expressivity, and the one of ordinary life. Before the development of the ethics of care, Murdoch’s ethics, as it emerges in the 1940s-1950s in Oxford, shows how attention is at the root of ethics – “loving attention” being part, in Murdoch’s “Plato-Weilian” vision, of the ethical meaning of care, something close to the utmost virtue of good. What I mean by attention to language refers to an approach that is both literary and philosophical. From her first writings, in a perspective that joins the conceptual approach in ethics and the moral perfectionism, Murdoch intuits that moral thought takes place within language. If language occurs as a moral vector, then life is steeped in morality, and so is literature. In this regard, Murdoch’s work influences the research that aims to highlight the significance of literature for moral life; a literature that defines a new form of attention to ordinary life as a meaningful experience that reforms the nature of moral thought.

Anscombe famously stated that “an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man” (1958: 4). Foot also famously questioned whether one has reason to act as morality requires (1972). In the end, both agreed that an Aristotelian virtue ethics could provide the answer. But do both agree on why an Aristotelian virtue ethics could provide the answer?

At issue is how we should understand the link between virtue and happiness. Foot relies on the notion of Aristotelian necessities, which she actually takes from Anscombe. Aristotelian necessities, being intimately related to the teleology of the species, are objectively grounded, but they do not depend on some external justification. This is how we should understand virtues: given the natural and social characteristics that define our species, virtues are necessary for the pursuit of a fulfilling life.

But is this the explanation that Anscombe was looking for, as to ‘how an unjust man is a bad man’? In this paper, I will argue that for Anscombe to be virtuous is already to occupy a certain normative standpoint, so reading Aristotle won’t provide modern readers with a i) a naturalistic foundation for ethics, nor with ii) a rational/instrumental proof valid to all human beings qua human beings.

My PhD research focuses on the relationship between the Weilian concepts of attention and malheur in Iris Murdoch and Elsa Morante. After tracing back the role played by Weil in both authors’ lives and works, I closely read Murdoch’s and Morante’s annotations on their own copies of Weil’s Cahiers and I explore their own interpretations of Weil’s fundamental concepts, in particular the relationship between attention and malheur and their place within these authors’ ideas of the role of the writer. Through the lens of Murdoch’s philosophical writings, I analyse some Weilian features of Morante’s novels that help define their ‘mystical realism’ based on attention and malheur. Finally, while trying to question the criticism of masochism and misogyny levelled against these authors, I present a certain idea of happiness that results from their views through the analysis of Murdoch’s radio-opera The One Alone and Morante’s La Canzone degli F.P. e degli I.M.. I argue that studying Morante through Murdoch, and Murdoch through Morante against the background of Weil’s philosophy, helps us reconsider the ethics of attention and the place of literature as a mystical milieu where ‘a battle for civilisation and justice’ (Existentialists and Mystics, 241) against unreality can be fought.

This paper explores Midgley’s pursuit of a notion of the self that recognises that it is our culture, our moral communities and our relationships that make us who we are. Midgley’s notion of the self is that of a social, relational and embedded being and one deeply connected with other animals and the natural world. Recognizing ourselves as human beings, participants ‘in moral context’ and interconnected moral communities must be our starting point and our framework for navigating a range of ethical dilemmas. Like Midgley, I take issue with the term ‘person’ and argue that this separation of persons and non-persons, and the term itself, allows ethical debates to languor in the abstract; it creates morally dangerous exclusions and an ‘us-and-them’ mentality which has been perpetuated by various forms of concentric circle models of ethics. Midgley’s notion of the self and her connected conception of ‘the moral community’, which is a ‘mixed’ moral community, is an essential framework, I will argue, for tackling ethical dilemmas such as abortion, but also animal and environmental ethics, indeed any community-ethical debate. Midgley offers an approach that will ensure we are expansive and imaginative in our vision and one that will attend to issues of marginalisation and one that takes context and relationships seriously.

“All my books, when I glance at them, seem terribly obvious [laughs]. At the time, I think, ‘Well, this is too obvious to say,’ but obvious things aren’t said in an academic context.” – Mary Midgley, Newcastle, 2012

Mary Midgley’s remarkable career saw the publication of over 250 books, journal articles, pamphlets, and other materials, concluding with the publication of What Is Philosophy For? at age 99. This work was the last in a series of publications late in Midgley’s career that underscored her reputation as a singular and influential thinker. The “Newcastle Sessions” – a series of visits and conversations between Greg McElwain and Midgley at her home in Newcastle from 2011-2018 – offers a window into this noteworthy period late in Midgley’s career. McElwain presents an overview and some of the highlights from these sessions and forthcoming book, including Midgley’s thoughts and concerns on life and the topics for which she is best-known.

My poster illustrates the overlap between John Dewey’s and Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy. I focus on the prominent place of moral ‘growth (Dewey) and ‘perfection’ (Murdoch) and its dependence on moral imagination in the work of both thinkers. The aim is to show how Murdoch and Dewey, despite their different frameworks, are allies in the search for a realistic moral philosophy rooted in moral life.

The von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki contain correspondence between Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright over a number of years. I will quote from two of these letters by Anscombe, in which she discusses both her opposition to the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II and her work on intention. My focus will be a passage in one letter which refers to her essay on Truman’s degree. She emphasizes here her belief that the just live by faith. I want to look more closely at what she says in this letter and in the essay itself. This will involve discussing her thoughts on the relation between faith and justice. I will look at the nature of the faith she has in mind. Far from being a blind faith, it is one that calls for intellectual ingenuity. It works against what she calls hypnotism, freeing the mind from conventional wisdom to seek the real thing for itself. I will argue also, however, that she does not really believe that it is strictly necessary to have religious faith in order to be just.

Mary Midgley resists comprehensive placement into any meta-ethical framework. She is first and foremost and pluralist – never explicitly assigning her position to a school or thought or philosophical ‘ism’. My poster tentatively prompts you to consider Midgley a kind of naturalist. I think Midgley’s positive position is distinctively naturalistic in light of the role she accords to natural facts about living beings in defining the content of morality.  In Beast and Man (1978) Midgley argues that the good for any living creature, human or nonhuman, can be discovered in natural facts about their nature. In the human animal, these facts include: our use of language, myth and picture making, our capacity for empathy with other species, and our tendency to ask questions (among others).

There are also enlightening similarities between Midgley’s naturalism and Philippa Foot’s naturalism. If you are interested, come and ask me about my more ambitious contention – that Midgley can be placed into a contemporary programme known as Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism. This umbrella term covers various diverse figures including: Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, Elisabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach and Alasdair MacIntyre.