Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature

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Penguin, Jul 1, 1999 - Philosophy - 576 pages
Best known as the author of twenty-six novels, Iris Murdoch has also made significant contributions to the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays. Tracing Murdoch's journey to a modern Platonism, this volume includes incisive evaluations of the thought and writings of T. S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvior, and Elias Canetti, as well as key texts on the continuing importance of the sublime, on the concept of love, and the role great literature can play in curing the ills of philosophy.Existentialists and Mystics not only illuminates the mysticism and intellectual underpinnings of Murdoch's novels, but confirms her major contributions to twentieth-century thought.
 

Contents

PART ONE Prologue
PART TWO Nostalgia for the Particular 195157
Metaphysics and Ethics
Vision and Choice in Morality
PART THREE Encountering Existentialism 195059
Outline of a Theory
The Existentialist Political Myth
Hegel in Modern Dress
Existentialists and Mystics
Salvation by Words
PART SIX Can Literature Help Cure the Ills of Philosophy? 195961
Against Dryness
On God and Good
The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts
Why Plato Banished the Artists
A Dialogue about

Knowing the Void
Mass Might and Myth
PART FIVE Towards a Practical Mysticism 195978
A Dialogue about Religion
AUTHORS NOTE
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About the author (1999)

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was born in Dublin and brought up in London. She studied philosophy at Cambridge and was a philosophy fellow at St. Anne's College for 20 years. She published her first novel in 1954 and was instantly recognized as a major talent. She went on to publish more than 26 novels, as well as works of philosophy, plays, and poetry.

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