Murdoch’s Fictional Philosophers: What They Say and What They Show

Abstract

In numerous interviews, Iris Murdoch claimed that her fiction-writing and her philosophy-writing were two entirely separate endeavours. Her readers, of course, know better. At the very least, her readers know that her novels are populated by philosophers and by people who think and talk about philosophical subjects. There are more writers than philosophers in the novels, and a number of these writers make a point of reminding the reader that they are not philosophers. This is an important confession, because many of them sound like philosophers. If the reader is aware of Murdoch’s philosophical works, she will recognize at once that Murdoch’s fictional philosophers do not merely sound like generic philosophers; several of them sound a lot like Iris Murdoch herself. They say the sorts of the things that Murdoch said. In several instances, specific ideas and even idioms from her philosophical works appear in novels that were being written at the same time. If most of them say things similar to Murdoch’s philosophy, they show something entirely different, however.