Art plays a significant role in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a major part of which may be interpreted as a proposal for the revision of religious belief. In this paper, I identify within Murdoch’s philosophical writings five distinct but related ways in which great art can assist moral/religious belief and practice: art can reveal to us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before”; this revelatory capacity provides us with evidence for the existence of the (...) Good, a metaphor for a transcendent reality of which God was also a symbol; art is a “hall of reflection” in which “everything under the sun can be examined and considered”; art provides us with an analogue for the way in which we should try to perceive our world; and art enables us to transcend our selfish concerns. I consider three possible objections: that Murdoch’s theory is not applicable to all forms of art; that the meaning of works of art is often ambiguous; and that there is disagreement about what constitutes a great work of art. I argue that none of these objections are decisive, and that all forms of art have at least the potential to furnish us with important tools for developing the insight required to live a moral/religious life. (shrink)

In much the same vein as recent studies of the printed word and book distribution in the Enlightenment, the independent scholar Schaberg has provided us with an unusual accounting of the “business” of publishing Nietzsche. This saga is of some import in the context of a philosopher who arguably was the first to heed the “materiality” of the text, and who had a marked fondness for programmatic statements and ever-changing reorganizations of his corpus, including new over-arching syntheses of his previous (...) works. Schaberg makes this visually clear by providing us with countless reproductions of the original title pages and tables of contents of Nietzsche’s “written productions”, revealing certain transitional plans which are little known to us today, as they were so quickly replaced by others. (shrink)