Love and Attention

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 32:59-72 (1992)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The matched pair ‘love’ and ‘attention’ is familiar to most of us from the essays in Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good. Although she tells us in that book that there is, in her view, no God in the traditional sense of that term, she provides accounts of art, prayer and morality that are religious. ‘Morality’, she tells us, ‘has always been connected with religion and religion with mysticism’ . The connection here is love and attention: ‘Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature’ . Art and morals are two aspects of the same struggle; both involve attending, a task of attention which goes on all the time, efforts of imagination which are important cumulatively . ‘Prayer’, she says, ‘is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love’

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Love analyzed.Roger E. Lamb (ed.) - 1997 - Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
The model of love: a study in philosophical theology.Vincent Brümmer - 1993 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Love’s Vision.Troy Jollimore - 2011 - Princeton University Press.
Love: a history.Simon May - 2011 - New Haven: Yale University Press.
Love and reason.Janet Martin Soskice - 2009 - In John Cornwell & Michael McGhee (eds.), Philosophers and God: At the Frontiers of Faith and Reason. Continuum.
Love.Bennett W. Helm - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Self Love.Stephen David Ross - 2010 - International Studies in Philosophy Monograph Series:129-152.
The philosophy of love.Haridas Chaudhuri - 1987 - New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Edited by Dionne Marx.
Love: Plato, the Bible and Freud.Douglas N. Morgan - 1964 - Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-10-19

Downloads
63 (#231,470)

6 months
13 (#118,494)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

Simone Weil: Suffering, Attention and Compassionate Thought.Stuart Jesson - 2014 - Studies in Christian Ethics 27 (2):185-201.
The feminine in body, language and spirituality.Kaye Gersch - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Queensland

Add more citations

References found in this work

Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity.Charles Taylor - 1989 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
The Sovereignty of Good.Iris Murdoch - 1970 - New York,: Schocken Books.
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity.Charles Taylor - 1994 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1):187-190.
The Fragility of Goodness.Martha Nussbaum - 1986 - Journal of Philosophy 85 (7):376-383.
The Sovereignty of Good.Iris Murdoch - 1971 - Religious Studies 8 (2):180-181.

View all 10 references / Add more references