Podcast appearances and mentions of Iris Murdoch

In this episode Miles and his guests kick-off a fantasy world cup featuring all of Murdoch's novels. Murdoch's novels will be separated into seven groups – we've added in the short story ‘Something Special' and the recently published ‘Poems from an Attic' to make the numbers works – and each day following the release of the podcast they'll be a window of 24 hours for you to vote for your favourite via Facebook and X (Bluesky doesn't have a poll function, sadly) The top two works from each group go through, with two third-placed works going through as ‘lucky losers' to the round of 16. There will then be knock-out stages ending up in the final, and even a 3rd/4th place play-off. Who will win? Who will end up missing out? And what will be over or underrated? The choice will be up to you! Joining me to discuss the groups, permutations, and the runners and riders are James Jefferies, created of irismurdoch.info and Liz Dexter, blogger extraordinaire and author of Iris Murdoch and the Common Reader.

La murciana Alicia Catalán nos trae una historia romántica muy potente. El canto de las ballenas sin mar. Y aquí conocemos a Vera, da un giro a su vida cuando empieza a trabajar de recepcionista en un hotel de Praga. Acaba de romper con su chico, y conoce a Edrian, un carismático apasionado de la cocina. Suma de Letras publica esta novela. El 15 de junio del año 2025 desapareció Valèria Costa, una niña de siete años. Dos semanas antes, sus padres habían decidido irse a vivir todos juntos a un pequeño pueblo del Pirineo. Así empieza El juego del silencio, de Gil Pratsobrerroca, autor que ha vendido en Cataluña 50.00 ejemplares con esta novela. Noir de primer nivel, de la mano de Reservoir Books. Celebramos los 25 años de La sombra del viento, de Carlos Ruiz-Zafón. En la sección de Audiolibros, Iris Murdoch.Y además, en bolsillo, Lorenzo Silva y Margaret Atwood.

Do you matter?It may be one of the most important questions a human being can ask.In this teaching on Psalm 127, John Ortberg explores meaning, significance, anxiety, achievement, and what the Bible says about human worth.Drawing from the work of Rebecca Goldstein, John examines what she calls a "crisis of mattering" and why so many people feel insignificant despite living in an age of unprecedented progress.This episode explores:- Psalm 127 and the search for meaning- Why achievement cannot provide lasting significance- The lie that your life doesn't matter- Your story inside God's larger story- The Incarnation and human worth- How every act of faithfulness mattersIf you've ever struggled with purpose, significance, discouragement, or the feeling that your life doesn't make a difference, this conversation is for you.Scriptures:- Psalm 127- Genesis 1- Matthew 10#Psalm127 #JohnOrtberg #Meaning #Purpose #SpiritualFormation #ChristianFaith #Prayer #BibleStudy #Significance #Psalms

In this episode Miles is joined by Lesley Chamberlain to discuss her newly-published monograph, 'Undoing the Moral Empire: Moral Philosophy in post-War Britain'. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/undoing-the-moral-empire-9781350457751/ After 1945, Britain wanted to be a new country. The authority of state and church were giving way, the Empire was dismantled, and it was no longer clear who was leading whom in matters of morals. Individuals were left to reinvent their ethical lives anew. The lives and works of the philosophers discussed in this book were caught up this sea-change. Bernard Williams, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Richard Wollheim, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre were all characters in search of a moral England, with a particular vision of the good society. From communitarianism to swinging Sixties' individualism, and radical theories of art – which understood questions of ambiguity, error and forgiveness more than the state ever could – this is the story of their sometimes convergent but often discrepant ideas on ethical life in the second half of the twentieth century. Undoing the Moral Empire is a work of biography, social history and the history of ideas that masterfully reconstructs the shifting sentiments of the post-war era, reconfiguring enduringly relevant questions of freedom, virtue, and society. Lesley is an author, literary critics and translator whose work has focused on Rilke, Nietzsche, German philosophy, Conservative Modern Russia, Heidegger, Van Gogh, Lenin, Freud, travel writing, cuisine in Russia and Poland, journalism and fiction – twelve books in all. She's also the author of the forthcoming chapter on Murdoch and Russian Literature in the Oxford Handbook of Iris Murdoch. This new book marks a homecoming for Lesley. You can find out much more about her work at her website: http://lesleychamberlain.co.uk/

Through her multifaceted work, the Bulgarian-born, Brooklyn-based writer, reader, and researcher Maria Popova, founder of the “free, ad-free, A.I.-free, fully human” website and newsletter The Marginalian, braids together literature, science, philosophy, poetry, and art in beautiful, alchemical ways. Traversing centuries, she approaches various ideas and thinkers, living and dead, as active references in the expansive, ongoing project of learning what it means to be human. Now, nearly 20 years since the site's founding, she continues to cultivate a singular space on the internet—one devoted not so much to information but to illumination. Her latest book, Traversal, which links figures such as Mary Shelley and Walt Whitman, alongside other writers, poets, physicists, and philosophers, serves as an intellectual journey and an across-time meditation on creativity, consciousness, and interconnectedness. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Popova discusses the idea of “spiritual ancestors,” why today's A.I. debates are fundamentally modern versions of age-old questions about the soul, and the mystery of being alive. Show notes:  Maria Popova [4:58] Traversal (2026) [5:43] René Descartes [6:50] Aristotle [6:50] Susan Sontag [7:03] Alan Lightman [8:16] Mary Shelley [8:16] Walt Whitman [9:42] Frankenstein (1818) [14:08] Frances “Fanny” Wright [17:13] Freeman Dyson [17:13] Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (2018) [16:04] Rube Goldberg [22:26] Nina Simone [23:28] Dan Frank [23:29] Figuring (2019) [34:24] The Marginalian [43:18] T.S. Elliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) [55:00] Dacher Keltner's Awe (2023) [45:17] Iris Murdoch [45:33] The Universe in Verse (2024) [45:55] Patti Smith [45:57] Rebecca Elson [45:58] Vera Rubin [47:23] “Urns for Living” [48:54] Sylvia Plath [59:35] Leaves of Grass (1855)

What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver's Travels. As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy. TRANSCRIPTHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz. Zena is a tutor at St. John's College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought. She runs the Catherine Project. She's famous on Twitter. We don't know how she does it all. Zena, welcome.ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It's great to be here.OLIVER: And we're talking about Gulliver's Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it's a book that you love.HITZ: A book that I've loved for a long time.First Encounter with Gulliver's TravelsOLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it?HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John's called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.”So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides, Plato's Timaeus, selections from Aristotle's Physics, Gulliver's Travels. After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy's Almagest, geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver's Travels after reading selections from Hooke's Micrographia, so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo's Starry Messenger, which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter.So then we read Gulliver's Travels. We also read Emma and Flannery O'Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we'd throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn't actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true.At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver's Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don't work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to—Gulliver's Travels is still one of the best books about that because it's in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account.Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he's a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn't see. And I think it's not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it's a very humane book. It's social criticism, but from a point of view of a very deep humanity. So I've always loved the book for these reasons since then.I came back to it more recently because it is part of the curriculum at St. John's. So when I came back to teach there, I began to reread it. The other experience I had was that I wrote a long essay on it when I was an undergraduate. So those are my—I'm not any kind of expert. My knowledge of the historical context of the book is limited. It's not zero, but it's limited. But I have always loved it as an account of human understanding and its failures and the way that might impact how we live and how happy we can be.The Houyhnhnm ProblemOLIVER: Have you changed how you think about it as you've taught it?HITZ: I have not really changed the way I think about it. It gets more—like all of these books, the more you read them, the more comes out of them, the more details come up. Hilarious. The more jokes you get, the more . . .I think the one more recent insight I had was, I hadn't understood the full horror of the Houyhnhnms in the last book until relatively recently. I think that took me some time to really take on. It's one of the cases where Gulliver's misperceptions are a bit harder to see, and I think many readers just assume that Swift is endorsing the praise of the Houyhnhnms in some sense or other.OLIVER: There are some very serious critics in the past who have called them Swift's ideal beings. Which at this point in history seems unthinkable, but it has been a belief among serious readers.HITZ: Yes, yes. And also common among students. Yes, it's absolutely one of the wrongest opinions you could have about anything, I think.OLIVER: Why does Swift allow us to make that mistake? Are we bad readers out of the context, or has he made too good a job of his diversions and concealments and ironies?HITZ: That's a great question, and I'll just take a stab at it. I think that he has hit on a mode of misperception which is very deep to us, and it's something that we're much more guilty of. We could imagine that if we were in a place where everyone was small or everyone was large, we might make mistakes like Gulliver makes. But we all live, I think, in communities that are a bit like the Houyhnhnms. And so we are all very subject to these kinds of deceptions, and I think that's how he gets us.That's not to really excuse the bad readings because, you know, Gulliver does leave the land of the Houyhnhnms with a boat made out of human skin, which should—I think that moment should make you realize, if you haven't yet, that something is very seriously wrong with Gulliver. Gulliver has been kind of destroyed as a person by his travels, and especially by this last trip. But if you pass over that little detail, maybe you think, “Oh, wow, he found some very simple beings.”OLIVER: Well, there's also the great council where they debate the genocide of the Yahoos.HITZ: [laughs] Yes.OLIVER: And it directly contradicts several things Gulliver has come to believe about the Houyhnhnms, about the Yahoos, and about himself. And he's completely unaware of these contradictions and so in awe of the Houyhnhnms that he doesn't quite understand, I think, that he's accounting a genocide.HITZ: That's right. That's right.OLIVER: Even though he uses a phrase from Genesis that's very unmistakable. It's a sort of remarkable moment of—particularly to us, having had the 20th century. I think that's why Swift came back into favor in a way, because people used to say, Swift's unbearable view of human nature . . .This is a great bit in Boswell's Life of Johnson where, when they're traveling through Scotland, they're with a lady, and she says to Johnson, “Is any man naturally good?” And Johnson says, “No, no more than a wolf.” And Boswell says, “Well, sir, what about ladies?” And Johnson says, “God, no, absolutely not.” And this woman says, “Oh my God, this is worse than Swift,” utterly horrific view of human nature.But of course, we can actually say, did he go far enough? [laughter] I mean, Swift clearly understands something very real and deep. The council of genocide is horrifyingly familiar to us. And I think that's much to Swift's credit that he can see that, and to show that Gulliver would blind himself to it. And people still blind themselves to it, right?HITZ: That's right. And I wonder—you would know more about this than me because it is a bit of a historical question, but my understanding is that quite a lot of the savagery, the worst parts of rule over men that we see in Gulliver's Travels are pictures of Ireland in the 17th, 18th centuries. And I wonder if that took some time to reveal itself to the British, and in some ways it's still not really as known as it might be. We think of the colonial project as being something that was directed at India and Africa—OLIVER: Faraway countries.HITZ: —faraway countries where people looked really different. And we're not as familiar with the kinds of things that were done to the cuddly Irish with their nice music, and who we don't think of as being people that you would savagely oppress like that. So I think—OLIVER: So, I think partly the English are not interested in their own history in the way that they are expected to be. And partly the English interest in Irish history has become very focused on the more recent events. And it's very hard to get back past that. And it all becomes very complicated, and it's a sort of different country. So there's some of that, but I think generally we don't want to know what we did, yes.HITZ: Well, and I think in anglophone countries in general, there's going to be a history of something like that. To attribute it to the British is not to say that—I mean, Americans have chattel slavery and the genocide of the natives, and the Australians have their own situation. All of the anglophone countries have something like this on their conscience.I think that obscures the meaning of that final book. I think we don't recognize—and that's really to Swift's credit, to have a social critique that is so real and so deep that you may not even recognize yourself in the picture.Slavery in Gulliver's TravelsOLIVER: Yes. When I read it again—I read it as an undergraduate, but I really was actually more interested in the other parts of Swift's work. And I thought it was brilliant, and then I read it again. And it was more recently that—I didn't understand how I couldn't have seen it, but it's basically a book about slavery, as I come back to it.And in each of the books there is enslavement of a different sort. So, to begin with, Gulliver is the one being kept in a box or kept in a house, or he's chained up by the Lilliputians or Glumdalclitch.HITZ: Right. That's right.OLIVER: She's a very nice sort of master, as it were, [laughter] but he has that box that can be sealed, and the dwarf has him swiping at the wasps. And then the enslavement that the flying island has of the country below is like England and Ireland. And then in the final book, you know, the Houyhnhnms are whipping the Yahoos.HITZ: That's right.OLIVER: The slavery thing gets worse and worse as the book goes on. And one of the things that's clever is that it's funny when Gulliver is enslaved, right? When the wasps are let out and he has to—and Swift sort of does that clever thing where he undermines things by making it a joke at the end. By the book of the Houyhnhnms, there is really very little humor. And the twist at the end is always dark.Gulliver can't see that—he can see that he's a bit like the Yahoos. But he can't see that they've been enslaved in the way that he—the farmer wanted to take him around the kingdom and show him off, and he says, “I couldn't possibly have had children in that condition because I couldn't have it on my conscience that I had begotten a slave, someone born into slavery. I couldn't do that.”HITZ: Right.OLIVER: Then he's in the Houyhnhnms and he can't—it's quite remarkable.HITZ: [laughs] Yes. I don't think it's quite true that in the end there's no humor. I read it with some Catherine Project group a couple of years ago, and one of the readers pointed out that it's not obvious Gulliver isn't leaving his home and sitting out in the ocean and always landing on England every single time; just every time, he lands there.And there's something hilarious about an Englishman that discovers a place where there's all horses, [laughter] and his love of horses overwhelms him, and he becomes persuaded that they're the only rational beings that there are. I mean, that is funny.OLIVER: Yes, I agree. There's a lot of irony and stuff. But I think it's in Lilliput when he describes their manner of writing. And he says they don't write from left to right as we do in England, or from right to left, or up-down like the Chinese, but from one corner to the other, as the ladies do in England. This is very funny, dry humor, and that sort of thing is gone. And the things that surprise you at the end of a sentence or a paragraph are more like, “Oh, and of course I used Yahoo skin to cover the boat.” And you're like, oh my God, this is not a joke anymore.You know, in A Modest Proposal, he makes real humor out of those kind of horrors. And with the Houyhnhnms, I think he actually refuses the joke to make you feel the disgust, in a way.HITZ: Yes, that might be right. That might be right.Swift and PhilosophyOLIVER: What do you think about the idea that the Houyhnhnms are drawn from the Phaedrus and Socrates's idea of the soul with the two horses? And there's the good, rational horse and the vulgar, passionate horse, and the Yahoos are the other horse. You see what I mean?HITZ: Yes, yes.OLIVER: Is Swift showing us the two sides, and Gulliver's mistake is to prefer the one and not the—HITZ: Right, I think I have heard something like this before. I'm a bit skeptical. Swift doesn't strike me as someone who uses philosophy in quite that way. I think he's much more interested in Gulliver's—the Houyhnhnms' self-deception about the kinds of beings they are. They do not say “the thing which is not,” yet Gulliver's master hides from him this conversation about the genocide for quite some time. And maybe we don't know if he tells him quite the whole truth about it. So there's—OLIVER: And he also conceals the fact that the others don't like Gulliver because he's a partial—a reasonable Yahoo, as it were.HITZ: Right. So their self-deception, Gulliver's being taken in by their self-deception, the ways in which they—this is one of the ways that I think it's profound about the nature of slavery. And to cheer us all up, I'll make a Holocaust analogy, as you also did.When I was traveling in Germany some years ago, in one of their Holocaust museums, there was an image from a Nazi-era German newspaper of Jewish people living in complete squalor in the ghetto. And of course, they had forced them into squalor. But somehow they forced them into squalor, and then this reinforces the sense that they're these rat-like beings.And there's something very similar that the Houyhnhnms do to the Yahoos. They force them into this animal state, and then they say, “Oh God, look, these people are disgusting. They just don't know how to act.” That seems to me the kind of level at which Swift is working. He is interested in the nature of a human being, but not in the abstract Platonic sense, I don't think.He strikes me as someone who believes in common sense, common decency, basic freedom, and basic use of reason. And he finds in his time that there's distorting teachings, distorting ways of behavior that have gotten people far off track. To me, that's what it feels like it comes from. It doesn't feel like Plato is in the background to me.OLIVER: Is there an extent to which, though, it's a work of sort of anti-philosophy? As you say, Swift, he likes common sense. He likes ordinary reason, and he likes what he would call the revealed truth of Christianity. So he talks, in his sermons about people, it comes to you from God like a light. It's revealed to you. And he doesn't like this idea that the philosophers can work it all out.And in a way, that's the same sort of mistake that the scientists think they can discover all this stuff, and they go in these crazy ways. And the Houyhnhnms are a bit like that. If you had philosopher-kings, they would end up being perverted examples of rationality because they're ignoring the—so do you think it's anti-philosophy in a way? The book is saying, “No, no, I don't want philosophers”?Criticizing Elite Intellectual CultureHITZ: That's definitely a plausible reading. But it's hard to tell whether it's anti-philosophy or anti a particular style of thinking. It's worth pointing out, in that light, that Gulliver, when he arrives in the land of the Houyhnhnms, before he even meets a horse, he sees a Yahoo who, from what I can tell from the text, is trying to wave at him and say hello, who recognizes him. And he's horrified. He sees him instantly as a monster.So I think immediately upon landing, he sees the Yahoos as monstrous, and that tells me that he must already be off kilter. So he's not just corrupted by the Houyhnhnms; he's been somehow led off track, away from the capacity to recognize fellow human beings before that.And he's come from this—the third book is all about various kinds of inquiry, scientific endeavors, practical endeavors, talking to the greats of the past, necromancy, and various kinds of inquiry into wisdom or things like wisdom. And somehow that's the thing that seems to push him to the point where he can no longer tell what a human being is.OLIVER: One of my favorite parts is when he's with the wizards, and he asks to be shown Homer and Aristotle and all their commentators. And he says that there were vast rooms full of these commentators, endless numbers of them. But Homer and Aristotle didn't recognize any of them because they were all so ashamed of the terrible things they'd said about these great men's works that they kept themselves forever in a different part of the underworld. They couldn't bear the shame of being revealed to having told lies and said second-rate things.It's very, very funny. And I think that's another sort of angle on which the book says, “You're so tempted to make a comment and have an idea and be a philosopher, and you should just accept the revealed truth of what is known. Just stop it. Just stop it.” [laughter]HITZ: Well, I suppose maybe I would also put it this way, that Swift sees the condition of 18th-century Ireland, which is quite poor, very bad. And it's ruled in a savage way by the English, who have a quite flourishing intellectual culture, as it happens, at this time.So I think what he might be is not a critic of philosophy so much as a critic of intellectual culture. Because intellectual culture seems to not only not help with existential concerns like slavery and oppression and savage poverty, but even serves to mask and hide and create illusions behind it.So that's, I guess, how it strikes me, as a book that's hostile to what you'd now call elite intellectual culture. And I don't know how fundamental that critique is, in light of its inability to solve problems for real human beings or to obscure the causes of what's going on with real human beings.OLIVER: I think it's quite fundamental because outside of Gulliver's—I think this comes into Gulliver's Travels, but what he might have said more explicitly elsewhere is, there are people starving in the streets of Dublin. And we've got corrupt politicians and intellectuals saying all these things, but you know, here she is starving. You don't need to work that out. [laughter] There's no question—the reveal—just be a Christian and, like, for goodness' sake . . .HITZ: Yes.OLIVER: And when, for example, he talks to the king of Brobdingnag, and there's that wonderful satire of the English government and everything. And he says, “Those people understood mathematics and poetry and whatever, but I could never drive into their head any sense of the abstract or any of these speculative—they simply didn't know what that was. They didn't know what I was saying.” [laughter]And so in a way, his ideal government is anti-philosophical because it would just look at the human problem in front of it. It wouldn't do speculative science. It wouldn't think of itself as rational, all this Platonic stuff. It would just—she's in rags, she has bare feet, you know?HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: What do we need a philosopher-king? Like, what are you talking about?HITZ: Exactly.OLIVER: The priest understands this because he's there in the city doing it. And is there something of that in the book, that constant resistance of the cleverness of people who cannot see daily life?HITZ: I think that's absolutely true, and I think it's probably one of the things I love about the book, because I think this somehow gets to something in my own heart. Even though I'm a professional intellectual—I have been my whole life—the distance between the concerns of professional intellectuals and the concerns of living, real people in various parts of the world is very large.And it's even worse when, as it was when I was coming up in grad school, there's a ton of explicit concern and various operations underway to improve life for others, which have zero connection with anything that anyone actually does. So I think the Laputans, which is the beginning of the third book, when Gulliver—OLIVER: The flying island.HITZ: Yes, when Gulliver visits the people on the flying island, who have one eye towards the heavens and one eye pointed inward. And they study music and mathematics, and they live in a giant flying saucer, which has the—OLIVER: And the flappers.HITZ: That's right. [laughter] When someone needs to talk to them, someone flaps their ears so that they pay attention. And their wives all run off with working people because they can't bear to be treated the way they are by men like this. And the flying saucer is not just distant. It also has the power to crush the towns underneath it if it judges them to be rebellious.This image will stick with you for the rest of your life. I mean, it's absolutely perfect, and the perfect image of bad government of a kind when intellectual culture is prized. And it's hinted early on in the book in Lilliput, when the rulers in Lilliput have to do these elaborate dances with ropes.OLIVER: Oh, with the king and the chief minister hold the pole, funny angles, and if you get under it, you get a green ribbon or a red ribbon.HITZ: Exactly. [laughter] And they have these athletic contests of grace and various colored ribbons, and that determine how far you get in the halls of power.OLIVER: Yes. Are you a cabinet minister or a junior minister? Yes, yes.HITZ: Exactly. So there, it's all just a funny joke. But it develops, I think, into the Laputans, people who have kinds of expertise that are actually hostile to them doing any kind of humane governing. So yes, that seems right to me.Christianity in GulliverOLIVER: To what extent is it a Christian book?HITZ: That's an interesting question. I've never found a strong Christian element in it myself. There are satires of religious wars, both in Lilliput, where Lilliput's at war with its neighboring city. Oh, wait a second, there's two different disputes in Lilliput. One is about what side you cut your egg on.OLIVER: There are the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians,HITZ: Right. And then there's also one about heel size. So there's two different kinds of disputes.OLIVER: With the marvelous image that the king is a Short-Heeler. But they think that the heir to the throne might be favorable to the High-Heelers because he has one heel slightly higher than the other, and he walks with a wobbly gait.HITZ: [laughs] That's right. This, again, in Lilliput is just utterly hilarious, outrageous, very silly, obviously a parody of religious wars between different kinds of Christians. But it resurfaces towards the end. It's the Houyhnhnms, where he talks to the Master Horse—OLIVER: And the horse sort of pretends to this great rationality, simply can't understand that men would kill each other over the question of whether flesh is bread or bread is flesh.HITZ: That's right. That's right. That's right. So there's definitely disparaging remarks about religious wars. And as you're talking about it, where along with Swift's praise of common sense, there's a kind of basic Christian morality, which is that the poor and the suffering need attention. That all strikes me as Christian. Apart from that, I'm not sure. If you have a religious take, I'd be interested to hear it.OLIVER: I find it very interesting that Swift had quite strict beliefs. He was not in favor of Catholics. He thought Dissenters should be tolerated, but he wanted the Test Act. He was very particular about all these things. And in his other works, he's quite direct about that. But in this book, he achieves a kind of high ambivalence. And he's not a Little-Ender or a Big-Ender.HITZ: That's right.OLIVER: And he says the religious text on which this is based simply says that you must break the egg at the most convenient end.HITZ: [laughs] That's right.OLIVER: Now, of course, in reality, he's a Little-Ender, and he's very committed to the Reformation, and he thinks it's all terrible that they're not. And it's interesting that someone with such angry, insistent beliefs on the Anglican Church would take this ambivalent position.And he satirizes so much. But the anti-slavery stuff, the description of the Laputans bringing the island down, and then he says, “I've never seen so much want and misery, and there's a wild look in their eyes, and they're wearing rags.” I mean, this is Dublin, right? This is just, along with the slavery, this basic Christian concern for the oppressed, the poor, the suffering.HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: And so I don't quite know. It's almost like the book is saying, again with this anti-intellectual thing, all these doctrinal disputes and which church this and who believes that. And here we have slaves and poor people and beggars and starving people.HITZ: Right.OLIVER: Christianity should deal with that first. So is the implicit criticism of his fellow Christians, in a way, that they're more interested in these disputes than in the fact that there are enslaved people and suffering people and—you see what I mean?HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: And Gulliver—the Houyhnhnms are highly rational but not Christian, which is a significant omission. And by the end, are you supposed to wonder if Gulliver actually isn't very much of a Christian? Because he can see this suffering and not respond to it at all.HITZ: Right, when maybe the—is the best person in the book the King of Brobdingnag? Does that seem right? The person with the—at least who says the best things?OLIVER: He says the best things. I think the best person is Glumdalclitch. She shows real charity and real love towards him.HITZ: What about the Houyhnhnm, the one who likes him, who says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo”? It's tear-jerking—OLIVER: Oh, the sorrel nag.HITZ: The sorrel nag. I can literally weep at that moment when she says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo.”OLIVER: That's true. That's true. She and Glumdalclitch are maybe more similar characters. Yes, yes, yes.HITZ: They're similar characters. Okay.OLIVER: And they have that basic, you don't need to call it Christian. You don't need—it doesn't need theology.HITZ: Humane. I would call it humane. Yes.OLIVER: They have that basic love of their fellow. You know, Glumdalclitch doesn't say, “Oh, how amusing this little man is, or how entertaining, or I can make—” She says, “He must be cared for. He looks a bit like me. He must be cared for.”HITZ: Right.OLIVER: And the sorrel nag, again, has the love of the fellow creature.HITZ: That's right. That's right.OLIVER: So I think Swift might be bringing in this, what he thinks of as the revealed truth of Christianity. Like, you shouldn't need telling, you shouldn't need to argue. It's there.HITZ: Right. This is just me making things up, which is what I'm here for. We're podcasting. Yes.OLIVER: Yes, of course. Also, is that not what the philosophers would do? That's what Swift would say.HITZ: But if I was going to make something up, what I would say is something like this: that Swift to me, from the testimony of Gulliver's Travels, which is the book of his I really know the best. I don't know much about the rest of it. He has a level of self-awareness and sophistication. So, he knows that that religious difference is being used as a pretext. He knows that it is obscuring the suffering of these people. So, for the purposes of the book, he says, “Look, if you're a smart person, if you're a smart ruler, if you're an actually humane, intelligent, commonsensical ruler, you know that the fact that they have the wrong religious views is not a reason for them to be enslaved and oppressed and starved.” So that would be my suspicion.And that's why I think, to me, the religion is so light, because it's not really a religious problem. It's actually just a human problem and a political problem that is, how do you run your country so that these subject peoples are allowed to be free and develop themselves and be full human beings? That would be my made-up guess.Students' Views of GulliverOLIVER: What do undergraduates think? What is it that they find interesting in the book, and what do they like or dislike?HITZ: It's been a couple of years. I think they like this idea that—we all think travel is very broadening, a great way to think about the world. You know, you can learn so much about one's fellow human beings. And whatever else is going on in Gulliver's Travels, travel does not necessarily produce enlightenment.So I think they like the attention to the ways in which, even when we are trying to learn, we fail to learn. And the ways in which structures of learning, like traveling or studying science, might actually make you worse and not better, things like that. But it's not a book—I think it's fair to say it's not one of the favorite books of the undergraduates.OLIVER: Okay.HITZ: I think they find it a little bit distant, and I'm not sure why that is.OLIVER: Is it because it sort of looks like a novel, but it's not what we have come to expect a novel to be? And it sort of has that—HITZ: I think that's right.OLIVER: The pre–Jane Austen novel is kind of weird to us now.HITZ: Well, they love Don Quixote.OLIVER: Okay.HITZ: And that is a challenge of a similar kind. It's a novel which doesn't quite read like a novel, and the humor is kind of old. I mean, it's also true—undergraduates, in my experience, in general—I hope they'll forgive me for saying this on a podcast—they're not always good at comedy. They tend to think that serious things must be tragic.OLIVER: You can't get an A by making a joke.HITZ: Well, more that they have a sense that an intellectual life is something serious. It's serious.OLIVER: Oh, yes. Okay. And the syllabus slightly reinforces that, doesn't it?HITZ: Well, it's sort of self-reinforcing because we used to read more Aristophanes. We used to read Rabelais.OLIVER: If you do Shakespeare, it'll be the tragedies.HITZ: No, no, we do Shakespeare comedies.OLIVER: Oh, you do? Okay.HITZ: Yes. We have As You Like It and The Tempest. And do we have more tragedies? Maybe one more tragedy than comedy, but not a terrible imbalance.OLIVER: Well, that's good.HITZ: It's not Shakespeare-type comedy that's—maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, a Shakespeare comedy is something that ends in a marriage, more or less.OLIVER: More or less.HITZ: It's things that are funny—they don't necessarily think that humor is a way of thinking.OLIVER: Do they struggle with irony?HITZ: No, not usually. As long as it's serious irony, Anyway, I'm not sure why. I think I'm making things—I'm going too far out of the grounds for drawing conclusions.Favorite Parts of the BookOLIVER: Sure. Do you have a favorite passage?HITZ: One of my favorites is the part—is it Balnibarbi where they have people who try to speak with objects?OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes.HITZ: And they have to carry around wagons full of things because they never know what you might want to talk about. [laughter] That's so weird. Because I think I spent a lot of time studying with philosophers, there's a bit of—something's on the nose about this.OLIVER: Yes.HITZ: You know, it's like, “No, you've got to say exactly—no, that's too imprecise. You have to say exactly what you mean.” Bernard Williams, the great philosopher, has something complaining about how contemporary philosophers are very controlling of their readers. They don't want anyone to make the slightest mistake about what they mean by a particular word. That's how the people who speak by objects strike me.OLIVER: Do you think that is a problem of contemporary philosophy?HITZ: Oh, sure. Yes, absolutely. Yes. The way Williams puts it is that when you write something, it should be like a cake mix, and the reader should be able to put their own egg and bake the cake themselves.OLIVER: Oh, I see. You mean like a box of mix, yes.HITZ: Yes, yes, exactly. It's like a box of cake mix. Whereas making the cake painstakingly and force-feeding it bite by bite to the reader is not actually an—OLIVER: Telling them how it tastes.HITZ: Telling them how it tastes is not an educational endeavor.OLIVER: When does this become too dominant in philosophy?HITZ: It's a feature of 20th-century analytic philosophy to be very careful with the meanings of words. And it's by no means universal; it's just a natural vice to the territory.Iris MurdochOLIVER: Is this a problem for someone like Iris Murdoch, or is it more the A. J. Ayer type?HITZ: No, it's the A. J. Ayer type, not Iris Murdoch. No, Iris Murdoch is heterodox outside of the—OLIVER: Do you like her philosophy?HITZ: I do, yes.OLIVER: What do you like about it? Platonic?HITZ: Now, see, I came here to talk about Swift. [laughter]OLIVER: I know, but you made such a good point about the satire of philosophers.HITZ: I like her writing for a more general educated audience, her not making assumptions about the philosophical training of her readers, and her use of Plato for sure, which is quite interesting and creative. She sort of ingests Plato and does something with it that I think is very interesting.OLIVER: Is she properly appreciated as a Platonist, or do you think there's more attention to be paid?HITZ: There's probably more attention to be paid, but she gets some attention. She gets some attention. I also don't think it was particularly helpful, these two books that came out a couple of years ago about Murdoch, Foot, Midgley, and Anscombe.OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I only read one of those. It was quite good.HITZ: It might be quite good, but those four women are quite different from one another. So it's an example of where attention to identity could obscure as much as it—OLIVER: Well, one of the books was more about the ideas—they were both obviously about the ideas—and one of them was more about the fact that they were together in Oxford. And that they benefited from hanging out, talking, doing different sorts of work, sleeping with each other's husbands, et cetera.HITZ: Yes, all the good stuff.OLIVER: And from the more sociological point of view, it was very interesting to see that, actually, a lot of what Murdoch did was bound up with her friendships and relationships, in that the argument basically is, A. J. Ayer and the others get sent away because of the war. So these four women are actually—they've been banned from this seminar and told they're not allowed.Well, now they can sit around and do what they want to do. And it worked, and they all produced very interesting things. So from that point of view, I think it was—but I agree with you, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch are not the same. [laughter]HITZ: Not even particularly similar. I also feel like I've read enough of Murdoch's novels to have a sense of what the sociological situation was like.OLIVER: You like the novels?HITZ: I do like them, yes.OLIVER: Do you have favorites?HITZ: I can't remember the name of my favorite because I haven't read them for years. It's one of the things I read years ago, the one—I'd remember it if I saw the title. There's an LSD trip at the beginning of it.OLIVER: Oh, The Good Apprentice. I love that book.HITZ: The Good Apprentice, yes. I think that was my favorite. But I never fell in love with it. I just liked it, and I found it interesting, and I found the sociology interesting. Okay, this is what academics at this time period were doing.What to Pair with SwiftOLIVER: We got diverted.HITZ: “We” got diverted. [laughs]OLIVER: We did. If Swift is on a great books syllabus, what is it good to pair him with? If people are reading Swift, on or off a syllabus, do you think there are other—Hooker, you said, which I think would be interesting.HITZ: No, Hooke. It's Hooke.OLIVER: Hooke. Hooke. That's a very good point.HITZ: The guy who wrote Micrographia, who has the enormous picture of the flea.OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. So that would be good. But any other? Is it worth reading Plato alongside him?HITZ: Well, I like to—he's on the list for something we called Life of the Mind Seminar at Catherine Project, which is our introduction to the life of the mind.OLIVER: And just to tell people, the Catherine Project—this is not a university. Anyone can join a seminar.HITZ: That's right. It's an open online readers community. Consists of small, high-quality conversations, mostly on Zoom, some in person.OLIVER: You could be some kid, an accountant, a dentist, whatever, and you come and do a—you've got a PhD running a seminar, and you get that experience.HITZ: Right. Some of them are peer led, so they're not necessarily PhDs running them. The reading groups are not necessarily run by PhDs. But the core program in which the Life of the Mind Seminar is—either a PhD or an ABD [all but degree] or someone with some academic experience is usually leading that. We have it there, and we have it there with a set of books that are meant to disorient rather than to orient.So one of the difficulties with reading great books with more or less random selections of adults is that people feel uncertain, out of place. And they bring expertise, real or fake, to the table, which makes it very difficult to have a conversation. It's usually fake expertise, for what it's worth.OLIVER: Give us an example of what you mean by fake expertise.HITZ: Well, so someone will have—we'll be, say, reading Hamlet. Someone will have taken a class on Shakespeare in college, and they'll say, “Actually, we're asking this question. But what I learned, my professor told me, is that Hamlet actually symbolizes—he has an Oedipus complex and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then this is what this means, and this is what that means.” And then your conversation's over, because you need to focus just on the text that's shared between the—OLIVER: It's not a crossword puzzle.HITZ: Exactly. It's not a crossword puzzle, and it's not something where—or the other—people often, again, they feel a bit on their back feet. So they'll google a bunch of stuff about the author, and they'll start tossing out random facts about the book or about the author, about the context. And again, you don't get really into the meat of the book that way.So, Gulliver's Travels is there to help us think about ways in which we might not be expert in things we're expert. Ways in which we might think we understand something and not understand it. And ways in which people who, with every appearance of seriousness and scientific principle, can just say unbelievably stupid things.So it's a very, very good book for that, where in that sense, it's I think very good for any liberal education program. It's liberating that way. One of the things we need to be liberated from is false expertise.OLIVER: You're talking really about these secondhand opinions that you haven't interrogated and come to understand yourself.HITZ: Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly.OLIVER: This is what Mill says. Everything is new to someone, and the real genius is that you find it out.HITZ: Exactly.OLIVER: You don't get taught it. Yes, yes.HITZ: Exactly, exactly. So real learning is things you find for yourself. Anyway, that's what I like it with. As for pairing it, yes, I think it would just depend on what you were—I don't have a clear thought about that. I think it'd be good to pair it with Galileo's Starry Messenger and preface to Hooke's Micrographia.But you could also pair it with Emma. Be quite good, actually, because Emma is also about someone who really doesn't know what they're doing and has no idea. Thinks they know what's going on; they really have no idea what's going on.OLIVER: Yes. Hamlet as well, in fact.HITZ: I guess so. Does he not know what's going on?OLIVER: Who's diverting now? [laughter] Well, there's an interesting question, isn't there, about whether Hamlet has legitimate doubts. So he says, “This ghost could be a demon. I should be careful. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to pretend to be mad. I'm going to find out.” Or whether he just doesn't want to see the truth in front of him, and he quote-unquote “delays” because of that. I don't know if you have a view.HITZ: I don't think he's deluded. I think the problem is something different, but I haven't thought enough about it recently to know what his volitional obstacle is. But I don't think he's deluded. I think he sees what's going on, but there's something about acting that doesn't work for him.OLIVER: An internal—HITZ: Something internal. Something internal. In a way, I find the play very hard. I don't know what, for instance, what does that obstacle have to do with Ophelia? What's going on with that? Anyway, he's very mysterious, but I don't—yes, that'd be my sense, is that he's not—OLIVER: Do you buy this idea that he's a nihilist?HITZ: No, although he's definitely faced with something like nihilism. He has to look at it. And of course, the play does end with everyone dead, [laughs] so it's not obvious that he's wrong.Sympathy for GulliverOLIVER: This question hangs over Gulliver as well. Is the problem by the end that he's basically become a nihilist? His response to the Yahoos is to deny meaning, deny the possibility of meaning, to shut himself away.HITZ: He is a true misanthrope. He hates human beings and refuses to interact with them and in that sense, in some way, removes himself from any further mistakes. In another way, the mistake that he's in is so massive that that hardly seems like a consolation. But yes, he's definitely stuck, and he's stuck in a place where who he is—because he's a human being. We have to remember that.So he's in a place of total self-hatred and the hatred of his neighbor, what you'd call from the Christian perspective a total loss of charity. Is that nihilist? I don't know, but it's definitely bad. It's not a good state to be in. Maybe I don't know what you mean by nihilism exactly.OLIVER: Are we supposed to disapprove of him at the end or sympathize with him?HITZ: Disapprove, I think.OLIVER: Yes? You don't feel sorry for him?HITZ: I do a bit.OLIVER: But not much.HITZ: Well, should I?OLIVER: I have come to believe—yes, this is what I've come to feel in subsequent readings, is that Gulliver, as you say, is very mistaken. He thinks he understands things that he does not understand. He has the sort of pretense of rationality, but he lacks any sort of meta rationality to see what his limits are.And he becomes, therefore—he doesn't advocate genocide, and he doesn't take any pleasure in using Yahoo skin, but he's just completely null to it. There's a sort of void there where human feeling ought to be. And it's tragic for him. It's a tragic ending that he is so isolated. And we can't sympathize with him, as it were, but we can feel sort of awful that he's shriveled into this state rather than judging or blame.I think one of the persistent themes of the book is, as I say, this kind of basic love of fellow creature, the Glumdalclitch or the sorrel. And if you take that from the book, you will wish you could bring Gulliver back.HITZ: Right. What you're saying reminds me that there is an interesting parallel in Plato's dialogues that I hadn't thought of before, Plato's Parmenides, which is perhaps the most difficult Plato's dialogue. So it's a conversation between young Socrates and the philosopher Parmenides. The first third of it is relatively clear, some arguments against what people think of as Plato's theory of forms.Then there's an extensive, insane dialectical process where various theses about the connection between being and oneness are both argued for and then refuted, and argued for and then refuted, pages and pages and pages and pages of it. So this seems to be—it's Parmenides and Zeno who are running Socrates through this ringer.And the person at the very beginning of the dialogue who they have to go find, to tell him the story of how Socrates met Parmenides, used to study philosophy. But now he just trains horses. [laughs] One of my teachers pointed this out to me, and I've never been able to get over it, that he spent this time doing philosophy, and he's like, “You know what? I'm going to work with horses for the rest of my life. If I never hear another human voice, that's fine with me.”So I think that is an interesting parallel. And I think it is not really that uncommon to see people who are totally disillusioned with relating to humans, who then relate to animals instead, like they devote themselves to animals.OLIVER: But on that reading, it might be a disillusionment with philosophical humanity. It might be philosophy that's killed Gulliver's human feeling.HITZ: That's right. Well, I think that's one possibility, one very strong possibility. That's why I think the Houyhnhnms come after the Laputans. Going to the furthest reaches of his intellectual interests just destroys his humanity.But it doesn't seem like exhaustion in the same way that whoever, I can't remember his name, the character who relates the Parmenides, where you just think he must be exhausted from having heard more than one conversation like this. [laughter] And just in the stable with the horses eating oats, I mean, it's just delightful. It's just so peaceful, you know?OLIVER: Bucolic, pastoral, yes.HITZ: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe you're right that we should be more sympathetic to someone in that situation.OLIVER: Well, next time you read it, you can tell me if you change your mind.HITZ: All right. I will tell you if I change my mind.OLIVER: Very good. Zena Hitz, thank you very much.HITZ: Thank you very much, Henry Oliver. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Are you paying attention when you scroll online? In episode 176 of Overthink, Ellie and David draw your attention to attention. They explain why attention is so hard to define and debate the extent to which it should be equated with consciousness. Is attention the same thing as consciousness? Or are there important differences between these concepts? They consider different ways that attention has been classified, from “overt vs. covert” to “effortful vs. effortless” to “voluntary vs. involuntary.” Ellie and David then discuss the commodification of attention and how it has been intensified by the digital era, or what Chris Hayes calls “the age of attention.” How has social media changed the way we attend to the world, to ourselves, and to others? Is our attention still our own? Or has it become alienated? In the Substack Bonus Segment, Ellie and David talk about Simone Weil's and Iris Murdoch's ethical approaches to attention.Works Discussed:Jelle Bruineberg, “Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy”Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered ResourceWilliam James, The Principles of PsychologyCarlos Montemayor and Harry Haroutioun Haladjian, Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious AttentionThe Friends of Attention, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation MovementEnjoy our work? Support Overthink via tax-deductible donation: https://www.givecampus.com/fj0w3v Subscribe to our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the debut episode of Editions, a podcast from Shakespeare and Company and Faber, literary director Adam Biles and Faber Editions curator Ella Griffiths are joined by novelist and performer Taìno Mendez to discuss Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke, the twentieth title in the Faber Editions imprint.Published in 1965 and long out of print, the novel follows Oliver, a Black teenager spending a final summer before college in the eccentric Michigan household of his wealthy patron Etta Klein and his aunt Harriet. Witty, camp, and shot through with tragedy, it defies easy categorisation; a drawing-room satire, a coming-of-age story, and a quietly radical work of civil rights era fiction.The conversation covers the novel's Wildean wit, its oblique engagement with race and queerness, the role of photographer Carl Van Vechten in the Harlem Renaissance, and what it means to write against expectation.Buy Ladies of the Rachmaninoff EyesUK: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571391783-ladies-of-the-rachmaninoff-eyes-faber-editions/Rest of World: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/ladies-of-the-rachmaninoff-eyes-faber-editionsBuy Rainbow Milk: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/rainbow-milkSign up to Faber's Heritage Subscription, featuring all Faber Editions titles: Subscribers get a book in the post each month for just £9 alongside a curated email with exclusive extra content about the book and its author.https://tr.ee/DsDYp5Books & Authors DiscussedThe Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze — William Saroyan (foreword by Stephen Fry)Mrs Caliban — Rachel IngallsPalace of the Peacock — Wilson HarrisOmeros — Derek WalcottThe Flower Beneath the Foot — Ronald FirbankSorrow in Sunlight (retitled Prancing N-) — Ronald FirbankGo Tell It on the Mountain — James BaldwinGiovanni's Room — James BaldwinAnother Country — James BaldwinÀ rebours (Against Nature) — Joris-Karl HuysmansEn rade (Stranded) — Joris-Karl HuysmansCheckout 19 — Claire-Louise BennettRainbow Milk — Taìno MendezUlysses — James Joyce Works by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch also mentionedIllusions— Ruth Lehmann (upcoming Faber Editions title, discussed with Megan Nolan on our next podcast episode)Films/TV Shows DiscussedGet Out — dir. Jordan PeeleLovers Rock — dir. Steve McQueenThe Defiant Ones — starring Sidney PoitierPlaytime — dir. Jacques TatiSeveranceBiosTaíno Mendez is a novelist based in the southern English town of Margate. Their first novel, Rainbow Milk, was an Observer Top Ten Best Debuts choice for 2020 and widely named as one of the best novels of the year, being shortlisted for a British Book Award and for the Jhalak Prize, Polari Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. Their non-fiction has been published in a variety of outlets including the WritersMosaic, the London Review of Books, Esquire, the Guardian and British Vogue. They are currently working on their second novel. Ella Griffiths is Faber's Head of Classics & HeritageAdam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and CompanyListen to Alex FreimanSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3dbKbpFyqPbklwEdeLYYZR?si=Q5vy9KkRTrqf1BqU1v33cgInsta : @alex.guitarfreiman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bart Geeraedts sprak op de Nacht van de Filosofie met Lotte Spreeuwenberg over de liefde, aan de hand van de Britse filosoof Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). Voor Murdoch is liefde een activiteit: het geven van onbaatzuchtige, liefdevolle aandacht aan de wereld buiten ons. Alleen door ons ego los te laten en met open vizier te kijken, kunnen we ons openen voor nieuwe perspectieven en betere mensen worden. 

Elizabeth Anscombe, philosophe britannique du XXe siècle, fut une figure aussi brillante qu'inclassable. Élève et proche de Ludwig Wittgenstein, elle s'imposa rapidement comme une voix singulière dans le paysage philosophique, à contre-courant des tendances dominantes de son époque.Pour partir à la découverte de cette philosophe atypique, nous nous entretenons dans cet épisode du Loyola Café, avec Blandine Lagrut, enseignante aux Facultés Loyola Paris et spécialiste d'Elizabeth Anscombe. Elle a notamment publié l'ouvrage Elizabeth Anscombe : une philosophie de l'intégrité (éditions Hermann, 2026) et coorganise, le 28 mai prochain, la soirée-débat Elizabeth Anscombe : un portrait philosophique.Au fil de l'entretien, Blandine Lagrut revient sur le parcours et la pensée d'une philosophe au tempérament affirmé. De ses années à Oxford aux côtés de Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley et Iris Murdoch, jusqu'à ses prises de position publiques marquantes, notamment contre Harry S. Truman après Hiroshima, Anscombe n'a cessé de questionner les fondements de la morale moderne: pourquoi refusait-elle certaines justifications de la guerre ? Pourquoi s'opposait-elle à des notions comme la « reddition inconditionnelle » ? Et en quoi, avec ses contemporaines d'Oxford, a-t-elle contribué à renouveler profondément la philosophie morale ? Aujourd'hui encore, la pensée d'Anscombe résonne et continue d'interroger notre rapport à l'action, à la responsabilité et au bien.Pour plus d'informations sur ou se procurer le livre Elizabeth Anscombe : une philosophie de l'intégrité, visiter : https://www.editions-hermann.fr/livre/elizabeth-anscombe-blandine-lagrutPour pour d'informations sur/ou s'inscrire à la soirée-débat Elizabeth Anscombe : un portrait philosophique, visiter : https://www.loyolaparis.fr/agenda/elizabeth-anscombe-un-portrait-philosophique/Entretien réalisé par Parnel LedagaFacultés Loyola Paris.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Join Hot Literati at hotliterati.comWhy Some People Are Magnetic It's not confidence. It's not looks. It's not charisma in the way people usually mean it. In this episode, Hailey "hailo" Denise Colborn makes the case that the rarest thing you can give someone isn't your time — it's your attention. Real attention, not performed attention. And most of us have never been taught the difference.We get into Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch's concept of unselfing, the neuroscience of being truly seen, and three practical ways to develop genuine presence. Plus: why reading long-form books is one of the best attention training tools available right now.Explore the Hot Literati Academy at hotliterati.com.

In this episode Miles discusses the mid-twentieth century gothic novel with a particular focus on Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns and, of course, Iris Murdoch. An enduring subject of fascination, the gothic novel has undergone substantial change over the course of its history and the rise of the mid-century gothic – and how it interacts with other forms of fiction writing at this time – is one we know you'll be interested in. Joining Miles to discuss the mid-century female gothic is Avril Horner. Avril is Professor Emeritus of English at Kingston University and is the author of numerous books on the Gothic – most recently Women and the Gothic – with Sue Zlosnik (2016) – and the author of Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence (Manchester University Press, 2024) and of the forthcoming Rebecca: Biography of a Novel (MUP: 2026). Murdoch aficionados will know her as the co-editor of Iris Murdoch and Morality and Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts both from Palgrave – and the co-editor of Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 from Chatto and Windus (2015). Long-time listeners of the podcast will remember that Avril was one of my guests on ‘Iris Murdoch for Beginners' so who better to be today's guest as we discuss mid-twentieth century Gothic fiction and put Murdoch into conversation with both Daphne du Maurier and Barbara Comyns.

Aquesta setmana a L'illa de Maians, presentat i dirigit per Bernat Dedéu, parlem del llibre ' Existencialistes i místics. Escrits sobre filosofia i literatura ', d'Iris Murdoch.L'edita Edicions 62 el 2026.En parlem amb Arià Paco i Berta Galofré. Un pòdcast d'Ona Llibres - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://onallibres.cat⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Presentat i dirigit per Bernat Dedéu.Edició i realització per Albert Olaya.

#poetry #philosophy #booklunch #MetaphysicalAnimals,This "Book Lunch" is a deep dive into the world of British philosophy of much of the twentieth century teeth century with a focus on 4 female philosophers who were giants in the arts as well as philosophy: Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe. This discussion will look at the viewpoint and prose styles of Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman as they bring alive the era and subject of their book, of such importance to our own era as well.

In this episode Miles is joined by Jil Evans and Charles Taliaferro (St. Olaf College, Minnesota, USA) to discuss their new book, 'Iris Murdoch and the Transcendent'. We cover love, ethics, mora illumination, gender, vision and the will and much more! https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Iris-Murdoch-and-the-Transcendent-by-Charles-Taliaferro-Jil-Evans/9781009631594 Jil Evans is an abstract artist and author whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is held in private and museum collections throughout the United States, including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Flaten Art Museum, and Halle Ford Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, which include a Jerome Foundation Grant, Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and a Pew Grant to study and paint Italy, and residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has co-authored three books with Charles Taliaferro. Charles Taliaferro is Emeritus professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Faithful Research, and a member of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of twenty books, most recently The Image in Mind; Theism, Naturalism and the Imagination, co-authored with the American artist Jil Evans. He has been a visiting scholar or guest lecturer at a large number of universities, including Brown, Cambridge, Notre Dame, Oxford, Princeton, and the University of Chicago.[1][2][3] Since 2013 Taliaferro is editor-in-chief of the journal Open Theology. He is the author of over twenty books in theology and philosophy of religion.

Guest artist HAROUN HAYWARD joins JILLIAN KNIPE to discuss his work via 'The Sea The Sea' by Iris Murdoch. Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, it was first published in 1978 by Chatto & Windus, and most recently by Vintage Classics as part of Penguin Books. The chaotic story centres around Charles Arrowby, a director, actor and playwright who has retired from his highly glamorous London life to become something of a hermit in a near isolated house by the sea. Just like in slapstick theatre he bumps up against a myriad of characters, including his buddhist cousin James, his childhood sweetheart Mary Hartley Fitch, ex lover Lizzie Scherer whose life he destabilises once again, and Lizzie's ex lover before Charles - Peregrine Arbelow, the Irish drunk.   Get in touch with us via artfictionspodcast@gmail.com Buy us a coffee! Support us on Patreon! Haroun and Jillian's conversation encompasses skateboarding, cancer, philosophy, thalassophobia, repetition, serpents, Japan, overthinking, identity, unclean, synesthesia, graffiti, enlightenment, hippiedom, apophenia, keystones, dog poo, constructivism, cascading failures, narrative honesty, suprematicism, magic realism, suppressing thought, apocalypse fish, landscape painting, self flagellation, vorticism, etching plates, herding cats, horror films, zombie formalism, lack of soul and poetry, and giving up painting to be a fry cook.

In this episode Miles is joined by Cathy Mason (Central European University, Vienna) to discuss her new book, 'Iris Murdoch's Moral Philosophy: Reframing the True, the Real, and the Good'. https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Iris-Murdochs-Moral-Philosophy-by-Cathy-Mason/9780198940432 Cathy Mason is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Central European University, Vienna and her main areas of research interest are Ethics, Epistemology (especially Moral Epistemology), Aesthetics, and Iris Murdoch's philosophical writing (particularly at the points where these areas converge). Her previous work has focused on the moral phenomena of everyday life, often drawing on virtue theory. She has written about a variety of topics such as friendship, love, mourning, forgiveness, hope and humility. Prior to coming to CEU, she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge – where she studied for her PhD - and taught at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham.

Long hidden in an attic, vivid and revelatory poems shine a new light on the life and loves of Iris Murdoch.In the dusty attic of Iris Murdoch's Oxford home lay a battered, black chest. In 2016, when the chest was finally opened, Murdoch's life in poems was revealed. Renowned for her fiercely intelligent novels and groundbreaking philosophy, Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Yet she is also known for her equally radical life – intense friendships, relationships with both men and women, and an open marriage – about which much has, often controversially, been written. Now, her tightly wrought and vivid poems reveal a new, deeply personal account in Murdoch's own voice. They range over the preoccupations closest to her heart, from the state of Ireland to memories of a first love lost in the Second World War.We speak to Dr Miles Leeson, one of the editors of Poems from an Attic by Iris Murdoch, to learn more about this exciting discovery and how it adds to our understanding of the work of the famous philosopher and novelist. Dr Leeson also reads three poems from the book, 'Reverie in Winchester Cathedral', 'I find that honesty is a hard thing', and 'Macaw in the Snow'. Dr Miles Leeson is Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester and Visiting Research Fellow at Kingston University. He is Lead Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, Series Editor of Iris Murdoch Today with Palgrave Macmillan, host of the Iris Murdoch Podcast, and has published widely on Murdoch's work. He published Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist in 2010, the edited collection Incest in Contemporary Literature (2018), the festschrift Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration (2019), the co-edited collections Iris Murdoch and the Literary Imagination (2022) and Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination (2025), co-edited her selected poetry Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems 1936-1995 (2025), and is currently writing Visiting Mrs Bayley and Other Essays (2026) Iris Murdoch and Feminism and editing The Oxford Handbook of Iris Murdoch (2028).You can find out more about him and his work here:https://www.chi.ac.uk/people/miles-leeson/Iris MurdochIris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. After working in the Treasury and in the UN, she discovered philosophy, eventually becoming Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford. Her philosophical concerns are at the heart of the 25 novels for which she became famous, gaining the Whitbread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea. Until her death in 1999, she lived in Oxford with her husband, the academic and critic, John Bayley. She wrote poetry all her life.The Iris Murdoch SocietyBuy the book: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/470920/poems-from-an-attic-by-murdoch-iris/9781784746124Music: “The Silver Swan” (O. Gibbons), performed by Denis Carpenter, Clara IMSLP (CC BY 3.0): https://clara.imslp.org/work/51148 —

How much can we truly know about the inner lives of others? Tom Sutcliffe is joined by Miles Leeson and Karen Leeder to reflect on the challenge of interpreting the minds and motivations of poets, both past and present. Editor Miles Leeson presents Poems from an Attic, a newly published collection of Iris Murdoch's previously unseen poetry. Found in a box long after her death, these intimate verses offer fresh insight into the desires of a writer better known for her novels and philosophy.Professor Karen Leeder has spent much of her career studying the poetry of East Germany. Her recent translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 won this year's Griffin Poetry Prize 2025. Grünbein has written about the wartime bombing of his birth city Dresden and as a translator of classical authors, including Aeschylus and Seneca, his work features reflections on the relevance of the past and of antiquity in the present. Nick Makoha's latest volume of poetry The New Carthaginians draws on an eclectic range of artistic, historic and cultural sources from the politics of 1970s Uganda to the myth of Icarus and the exploded collages of the neo-expressionist art movement. He writes employing symbols and traditions in startling ways to transform what we might think we know into something completely new. Producer: Ruth Watts

In this lecture, given on Monday 15th December 2025, Dr Lucy Oulton (University of Chichester), Murdoch's enduring relationship with the figure of Peter Pan is discussed: her talk is titled '‘An Ousted Gabriel': Iris Murdoch and the Enduring Allure of Peter Pan' Wendy and Peter Pan, a stage adaptation of the J.M. Barrie novel Peter and Wendy, embraces a key detail from Barrie's own childhood, dealing sensitively with the topic of child loss. The play foregrounds Wendy's attempts to come to terms with the loss of a (third) brother, while her parents are overwhelmed by grief. Iris Murdoch's fascination with Peter Pan is well documented. Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe observe that she ‘most heavily depends on the Peter Pan myth […] in relationships which lack warmth, connections and love'. My talk focuses on three of Murdoch's fictional daughters who attempt to fathom their own circumstances in a shifting state of adolescence. I explore Murdoch's ideation of the girls in relation to this cultural icon, and her incisive understanding of what it means to grow up. Lucy is a Associate at the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester and her first monograph, Iris Murdoch's Wild Imagination: Nature and the Environment was published earlier this year. She is an editor of the Iris Murdoch Review and has lectured intentionally on Murdoch's life and work.

In this episode Miles is joined by Frances White and Robert Cremins - both from the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester - to discuss Murdoch's final novel, Jackson's Dilemma. Frances is the Deputy Director of the IMRC at Chichester and the author of many works on Murdoch, the most recent being the edited collection Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination (Palgrave, 2025) and Poems from An attic: Selected Poems 1936-1995 (Chatto and Windus, 2025). Robert is a writer and was Senior Lecturer in the Honours College at the University of Houston, and the Faculty Director of Creative Works. A novelist, short story writer and literary critic, Robert has got a lifelong love of Murdoch's fiction. He has recently co-edited North American special edition of the Iris Murdoch Review, published in November 2025, and is writing his PhD thesis at Chichester on the influence of Henry James on Murdoch.

This episode is on the 1991 film, Other People's Money. To hear the B-side on Iris Murdoch, subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thelackpodcast

Gwendolyn Dolske interviews Philosophy Professor Benjamin Libscomb (The Women Are Up To Something). How did four women philosophers, Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley shape Ethical Theory?  What was the historical context of their work?  How did they uniquely engage in philosophical discourse and contribute to exploring concrete ethical dilemmas? Get your dose of Philosophy and History with this discussion about these incredible thinkers.  Learn more about Professor Libscomb's work: https://www.houghton.edu/staff-members/benjamin-lipscomb/ Support the pod and get extra content: https://www.patreon.com/c/GoodIsInTheDetails Get in touch: https://www.goodisinthedetails.com

Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son's choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clearly and justly she comes to accept and even appreciate the younger woman. For Iris Murdoch this is an example of moral labour, the struggle to achieve virtue that is understood intuitively by all of us. In her 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good, a collection of three lectures, Murdoch rejects the unambitious, ‘milk and water' ethics of her fellow English moralists at Oxford in favour of a Platonic system in which morality has the same objectivity as mathematics. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Murdoch's lifelong philosophical project to establish what the rational unity of morality might be like without God. They consider her ideas of ‘unselfing' and of goodness as a replacement for God, and what she got wrong about Sartre's distinction between authenticity and sincerity. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Alexander Nehamas: John Bayley's 'Iris': https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch1 James Wood: Existentialists and Mystics: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch2 Rosemary Hill on Iris Murdoch: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch3 Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

In this episode Miles is joined by Anne Rowe (University of Chichester/Kingston), Rachel Hirschler (Kinston University) and Rosanna Hilyard (Chatto & Windus) to celebrate the publication of 'Poems from An Attic: Selected Poems 1936-1995', published today by Chatto and Windus. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/470920/poems-from-an-attic-by-murdoch-iris/9781784746124 ANNE ROWE is Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester and Emeritus Research Fellow with the Iris Murdoch Archive Project at Kingston University. She has published widely on Iris Murdoch, including The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch (2002), Iris Murdoch in the Writers and Their Work series (2019) and most recently is Co-Editor of Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems 1936-1995 by Iris Murdoch (2025). Rachel Hirschler works at the Kingston University archives and is lead transcriber for Murdoch's poetry and much else besides. Rosanna Hilyard is Assistant Editor at Chatto and Windus, and has been shepherding Poems from an Attic to publication. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The Isis Magazine, The Northern Echo, and several anthologies including Tactical Reading, Adrift and Outside Of Me.

In this episode Miles talks to Andrea Delaune (University of Canterbury, New Zealand) about her new book, 'Iris Murdoch and Early Childhood Education: Enhancing Attention and Moral Vision in Pedagogy' (Routledge, 2025). https://www.routledge.com/Iris-Murdoch-and-Early-Childhood-Education-Enhancing-Attention-and-Moral-Vision-in-Pedagogy/Delaune/p/book/9781032886169 Andrea Delaune is Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at University of Canterbury (Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha), New Zealand, where she conducts research at the intersection of ethics, pedagogy and early childhood practice. Her scholarly work explores how moral philosophy—especially concepts of attention, care, and moral vision—can illuminate and revitalise the everyday practices of early childhood teaching, care and policy. One of her central studies draws on the work of Iris Murdoch, applying Murdoch's ideas of attention and the moral imagination to early childhood contexts. Beyond her research, Delaune is actively engaged in the professional community: she serves as Co-President of OMEP Aotearoa, New Zealand (the local chapter of the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education), where she is involved in advancing children's rights, well-being of early childhood educators, and ethical dimensions of educator-child relationships. Iris Murdoch and Early Childhood Education: Enhancing Attention and Moral Vision in Pedagogy (Routledge, 2026), argues for a reconceptualisation of teaching as a lived philosophical practice rather than purely a technical act.

Episode 217: Hosts Richard Kyte and Scott Rada tackle a subject that’s easy to overlook — beauty. Not the kind of beauty sold in store aisles or filtered through a cellphone, but the kind that stops us in our tracks and makes us forget, for just a moment, about ourselves. Kyte recalls a recent camping trip during which he stumbled upon a scene so stunning that he instinctively reached for his phone — only to realize he’d left it behind. What followed, he says, was an experience of pure presence: sunbeams slicing through lifting fog, the quiet steps of deer and the realization that no photograph could ever do it justice. That moment becomes the starting point for a conversation about how beauty reshapes our sense of meaning and morality. “We spend so much time in our own heads,” Kyte said. “Beauty reminds us there’s something significant outside ourselves.” It’s an idea that stretches from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays on nature to Iris Murdoch’s notion of “unselfing” — the idea that paying attention to something beyond our own desires is the first step toward living ethically. Rada connects those philosophical ideas to everyday life — including the digital habits that make true attention harder to find. He wonders whether seeing a beautiful image on a four-inch screen counts as the same kind of experience. Kyte doesn’t dismiss the value of photography but insists that beauty can’t be possessed, only encountered. “The moment we try to capture it, we risk losing it,” he said. The discussion ranges from foggy forests to still-life paintings, from Emerson’s influence on John Muir to the idea that even the way we see other people changes when we cultivate reverence. Along the way, the hosts wrestle with one provocative question: If we begin to see beauty everywhere, does it still feel extraordinary?

Licenciado en Filología Inglesa y en Filología Hispánica, doctor en Literatura española y teoría de la literatura. Ha escrito varios libros, entre ellos: Manual de supervivencia (que le valió el Premio del Instituto Literario y Cultural Hispánico), Darwin en las Galápagos, el diario Viaje al ojo de un caballo, Veinte días en Mongolia, El volumen de relatos Cuatro cuentos italianos, el poemario Lisergia, El libro de historiografía y teoría literaria El poema en prosa en los años setenta en España, etc. Traductor de autores como W. B. Yeats, Robert Browning, R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, Joseph Campbell, Leslie Stephen o Mark Haber. Es también profesor de inglés en la Escuela Oficial de Idiomas de Madrid-Carabanchel.

In this episode we discuss Murdoch's conceptualisation of virtue and what it might mean to be virtuous. We'll range across her philosophy, of course, but we'll also have time to visit her fiction and consider if she embeds some of her ideas about virtue into her novels. Joining Miles to discuss this fascinating topic is Tony Milligan. Tony is a Research Fellow in Philosophy of Ethics in the Theology and Religious Studies at Kings College, University of London. And his current research, as part of the KCL (China) team and the University of Manchester (Russia) team within the Cosmological Visionaries project, takes in the ethical aspects of dialogue building between local scientists, indigenous peoples and national minorities in Russia and China in the face of climate change. The key theme uniting his broader areas of research is otherness and our shared future. This works its way into various publications on Space (other places), philosophy of love (other people), and animals (other creatures). Tony is also an Affiliate of the Lau China Institute. For many years he's been fascinated by Murdoch's philosophy, indeed his PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow was titled 'Iris Murdoch's Romantic Platonism' and he's gone on to publish widely on her work.

1 september. Mattias Svensson samtalar med Anna Victoria Hallberg om hennes bok ”Du berör min själ: Scener ur ett liv med Iris Murdoch”. Utöver Iris Murdochs tankar och författarskap diskuterar de individens frihet, tråkiga filosofer och hur man blir en borgerlig bohem.

Welcome to a new season of the Iris Murdoch Podcast! In this episode we're celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of Murdoch very best novels, and one of the six first-person male narrated novels, A Word Child. This is a revisit as we discussed this wonderful novel way back in 2021 – it was our ninth podcast and this episode is our seventieth! – so if you might want to catch up with that one if you love this novel. As you might expect, we also discuss a wide range of Murdoch's other novels. Joining Miles is Frances White. Frances is the Deputy director of the IMRC here at Chichester and the author of many works on Murdoch, the most recent being the edited collection Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination (Palgrave, 2025) And joining Frances and Miles is Liz Whittome. For many years she was the Chief and Principal Examiner of English for Cambridge Examinations. She has published several books on studying English at A-Level with Cambridge University Press. She is currently writing a monograph on Murdoch and Shakespeare.

We're counting down the days until the publication of The Hallmarked Man! Nick Jeffery and John Granger take perhaps the last look at Rowling's most recent postings before they dive into discussion about the meaning and artistry of Strike8.In today's conversation, they review Rowling's relationship with Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, a New York Times feature article ‘The Wizard's Everlasting Spell' about the growth of Potter fan fiction with a romantic twist, and Rowling's acerbic review of Nikola Sturgeon's memoir Frankly. Nick and John discuss along the way the initial response of cultural gatekeepers to the quality of the writing in Harry Potter, the history of Rowling's relationship with the writers of romantic fan fiction using her characters in light of Fifty Shades of Gray, and Hogwarts Professor's role in making ‘Rowling Studies' legitimate and the culture-wide acceptance of Rowling as a writer of merit “something we've always known” rather than a controversial assertion.And what does all that have to do with the imminent release of Hallmarked Man? Nick and John share their more-than-tentative plans for reading Strike8 and the best way — not the only way, of course, but a much better way than, say, cataloging predictions everyone will forget by mid-September — to prepare for our first reading of an epic Rowling-Galbraith title.We hope you are as excited as we are to the advent of Hallmarked Man and that you're looking forward to exploration of its breadth and depth beneath the surface plot with us in the coming month!Links To Subjects Discussed Above:The Wizard's Everlasting Spell Why Magic, Dragons and Explicit Sex Are in Bookstores Everywhere: Romantasy is propping up the fiction market. Thanks to a generation that grew up reading about a boy wizard. (The New York Times, 20 August 2025, Alexandra Alter)The new version of the [‘Dramione' Potter fan fiction] story that so captivated Ms. Stallone will soon be released as “Alchemised,” and the novel's publisher, Del Rey, is betting that the feverish devotion to its fanfiction predecessor will translate into blockbuster sales. Del Rey has ordered a first printing of 750,000 copies for the novel's release in late September; translations are lined up in 21 languages.Besides appealing to hordes of existing fans, “Alchemised” has another advantage: It taps into the raging appetite for romantasy, a subgenre that blends fantasy elements like magic, fairies and dragons with love, yearning and explicit sex.In a way, the romantasy explosion — driven by the success of blockbuster authors like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, whose series have sold millions upon millions of copies — stems from the legacy of popular young adult series like “Twilight” and “Harry Potter.” Those books molded generations of young readers who have grown up but still crave big fantasy novels — now with a dose of erotica.“They grew up with the characters, and the stories ended, but there's still such a huge appetite,” said Leah Hultenschmidt, publisher of the romance imprint Forever. “They're still hungry for that magical world building, an epic cast of characters and heroism, and maybe they just want it a little spicier.”Publishers are frantically searching for the next breakout romantasy series. Last year, romantasy sales topped more than 32 million copies in print alone, a 47 percent jump over the previous year, according to Circana Bookscan. Five of the 10 best-selling adult fiction titles this year are romantasies. At the same time, adult fiction sales overall have stagnated.The kind of romance that's selling like crazy now — erotically charged genre mash-ups — first took off in fanfiction before publishers recognized there was an appetite for it.“For a long time, you had to go to fanfiction to find that,” said Anne Jamison, a professor of English at the University of Utah who has studied fanfiction. “Romantasy basically is what fanfiction made.”* Alchemized Sen Lin Yu* ‘Romantasy' Novels on Amazon, Etc.The twilight of Nicola Sturgeon: J.K. Rowling reviews FranklyI know I'm stating the obvious, and I'll probably be one of countless reviewers making the same point, but it's impossible to read Nicola Sturgeon's memoir without remembering the smash hit fictional franchise, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. For those who don't know (ie, everyone who wasn't a tween or teenage girl, or living with one, 2005-2015), Twilight was massively popular for roughly a decade, each new book or film being greeted adoringly by its devoted fans. [opening paragraph)Rowling and Romantasy:* ‘The Twenty Richest Authors in the World:' Rowling #2 (!), Meyer #18, Collins #20* The Sunday Times' List of the “100 Bestselling Books of the Last Five Decades:” Rowling #23, Meyer #42, 58, 59, and 64* Twilight Book Sales * Stephen King: “Stephenie Meyer Can't Write Worth a Darn”* Speaking of Disappearances – Whatever Happened to Stephenie Meyer?* Fifty Shades of Grey Book Sales* ‘Fifty Shades Outsells Harry Potter'* ‘Rowling Refuses to Read Fifty Shades'* Rowling about Sales of Fifty Shades: “Just think how many books I could've sold if Harry had been a bit more creative with his wand.”Rowling August 2025 Tweet about Writers who are All Lake No Shed (and Vice-Versa) The Silkworm and its Women Writers:* Kathryn Kent: “I write fantasy with a twist… It's fantasy slash erotica really, but quite literary” (416) “She makes Dorcus Pengelly look like Iris Murdoch” (232)* Dorcus Pengelly: “She writes pornography dressed up as historical romance” (225)* Elizabeth Tassel: All Shed, No Lake (per Strike)You told Quine that Bombyx Mori sounded brilliant, that it would be the best thing he'd ever done, that it was going to be a massive success, but that he ought to keep the contents very, very quiet in case of legal action, and to make a bigger splash when it was unveiled.And all the time you were writing your own version. You had plenty of time to get it right, didn't you, Elizabeth? Twenty-six years of empty evenings, you could have written plenty of books by now, with your first from Oxford… but what would you write about? You haven't exactly lived a full life, have you?… (442)Did it feel good, raping and killing your way through everyone you knew, Elizabeth? One big explosion of malice and obscenity, revenging yourself on everyone, painting yourself as the unacclaimed genius, taking sideswipes at everyone with a more successful love life, a more satisfying — (440)* Michael Fancourt about women writers (298):I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don't retract a word. That is a fact.* Hobart's Sin, Owen Quine's first and best novel, the “Key” to Tassel's Bombyx Mori, the “book within a book:” “The plot of Hobart's Sin turns on Hobart, who's both male and female, having to choose between parenthood and abandoning his aspirations as a writer: aborting his baby, or abandoning his brainchild” (229)* “It's all about a hermaphrodite who's pregnant and gets an abortion because a kid would interfere with his literary ambitions” (242)* Rowling about The Silkworm: It is the Story that Inspired the Series, the Lake OriginActually, the plot for Silkworm predated the plot for Cuckoo's Calling. I'd had the idea for that plot, the book within the book, for seven or eight years before I wrote it. That often happens with me, I have an idea and I keep it and sit on it. But I keep it and I play with it like a Rubik's cube and there'll come a point where everything clicks and it's ready to be written. I have a lot of notebooks filled with these kinds of things. Silkworm was like that. I sat on that plot for a long time before using it.* “It's a novel about novels with another novel inside it” (~1;15)Reading for Wisdom and JolliesAn Introduction to and Example of Reading Rowling at Four Levels: A Quadrigal Reading of The Christmas PigReading Rowling the Hard, Right Way versus Enjoying the Surface Story and Discussing Themes: An Introduction to Perennialist ReadingTraditional Symbols in Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike: A Perennialist ViewHarry Potter's Bookshelf — What to Read to Understand Rowling's Artistry and How to Read Her Work to Grasp Her Meaning and IntentionThe Deathly Hallows LecturesHarry Potter as Ring Cycle and Ring Composition* ‘How Does Ring Composition Work Anyway?'Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Stanton Linden)How to Think About The Ink Black Heart Pre-Publication – Seven Tools for Serious Readers to Review (February 2022)And Don't Forget!* In Praise of Friendship - a Robin and Strike Heresy Get full access to Hogwarts Professor at hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/subscribe

durée : 00:58:59 - Avec philosophie - par : Géraldine Mosna-Savoye, Antoine Ravon - À travers ses romans et sa réflexion philosophique, Iris Murdoch explore des thèmes tels que la liberté, les relations humaines, le pouvoir des structures sociales, tout en donnant une voix complexe aux expériences féminines. En quoi consiste la voie féministe subtile indiquée par Iris Murdoch ? - réalisation : Nicolas Berger - invités : Camille Braune Doctorante en philosophie à l'université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

durée : 00:59:08 - Avec philosophie - par : Géraldine Mosna-Savoye, Antoine Ravon - En 1970, Iris Murdoch publie "La souveraineté du Bien", ouvrage marqué par ses lectures de Platon, de Wittgenstein ou encore de Simone Weil. Comment la conception du Bien d'Iris Murdoch nous donne-t-elle les clés afin de nous rendre (moralement) meilleurs ? - réalisation : Nicolas Berger - invités : Emmanuel Halais Philosophe français

durée : 00:59:47 - Avec philosophie - par : Géraldine Mosna-Savoye, Antoine Ravon - Dans le premier roman d'Iris Murdoch "Sous le filet" (1954), nous suivons le héros Jake, empêtré entre sa paresse, ses galères d'argent, ses illusions qui perdurent et les inévitables malentendus du langage. En quoi ce roman est-il nourri par les préoccupations philosophiques de Murdoch ? - réalisation : Nicolas Berger - invités : Barbara Servant Docteure en littérature comparée, chercheuse associée au CERC Paris 3 Sorbonne Université et au CELLAM, Université de Rennes 2.

durée : 00:59:44 - Avec philosophie - par : Géraldine Mosna-Savoye, Antoine Ravon - L'itinéraire philosophique d'Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) est marqué par les enseignements de Wittgenstein sur le langage, ainsi que par l'existentialisme sartrien. Comment découvrir la vérité si le langage peut mentir ? Peut-on percer le mystère de la vie humaine, en dépit de son opacité ? - réalisation : Nicolas Berger - invités : Frédéric Worms Philosophe, directeur de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de Pari

In this lecture Miles Leeson, Director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester, discusses Murdoch's reception by her contemporaries and look at the lighter side of how she was lampooned, both directly and indirectly, in the work of H.E. Bates, Malcolm Bradbury, Brigid Brophy, Barbara Pym and Ian McEwan, as well as the reception of her work by Philip Larkin and Monica Jones. Whilst a good deal of this was affectionate, and some even complementary, there was also a streak of jealousy and cruelty present. As Murdoch grew in popularity, and as a public intellectual figure, this became commonplace and is part of the mythic figure of ‘Iris' that was played out in the 2001 film, but has now has begun to fade from the public imagination. Miles's lecture asks what it might mean for us to admire her work today in the light of these texts.

It's more clear than ever that outdated concepts of governance are failing the people, with horrifying results. Let's embrace a new concept of anationality (which rejects nationalism as atheism rejects religion) and search for a more humane ethics of attention, empathy and unselfing, such as can be found in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch.

In this second episode focused on Existentialists and Mystics we'll be reading two essays – ‘Thinking and Language' and ‘Nostalgia for the Particular' – together. If you've yet to listen to our prior episode on Murdoch earliest work on Sartre then you may wish to catch up with that, before you listen to us here. Both essay were originally give as oral presentations. The first, ‘Thinking and Language' came from a symposium entitled, naturally enough, Thinking and language and was part of a conversation between Murdoch, Gilbert Ryle and A.C. Lloyd in 1951. The second, ‘Nostalgia for the Particular' was read at a meeting of the Aristotelian Society on the 9th June 1952. As both papers reference each other in their published form it seemed obvious to discuss them together on one episode. Miles is joined by Lesley Jamieson. Lesley is an Assistant Professor and postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value at the University of Pardubice (Czechia) and her research has centred on the history of analytic philosophy (with a focus on women, especially Iris Murdoch). This work has resulted in a monograph entitled Iris Murdoch's Practical Metaphysics: A Guide to her Early Writings (Palgrave, 2023), as well as a number of articles on the philosophy of mind and philosophy of education. Lesley's current research is an examination the practice of "public philosophy" just prior to and after the Second World War among such figures as Susan Stebbing, A. J. Ayer and Iris Murdoch.

Send us a textIf Brigid Brophy's The King of a Rainy Country had a soundtrack, it might include the soft patter of rain on a garret window, jazz drifting from a smoky cafe, the hum of a Vespa on narrow cobblestone streets … and the obnoxious griping of a few dozen uncultured Americans! As the description suggests, Brophy's 1956 novel has a little bit of everything  — atmosphere, nostalgia and poignancy mixed with subversive wit and madcap antics. Kim and Amy play “tour guide” examining Brophy's life and accomplishments, including this wonderfully quirky book, recently reissued by McNally Editions.Mentioned in this episode:McNally Editions The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid BrophyMarginalia article about Brigid Brophy and Iris Murdoch by Maria PopovaLost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 51 on Rosamond LehmannDusty Answer by Rosamond LehmannLost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 150 on Elizabeth SmartBy Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth SmartLost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 184 on Elizabeth Taylor Vs. Elizabeth TaylorBBC program “Take it Or Leave It”In Transit by Brigid BrophyHackenfeller's Ape by Brigid BrophyThe Snowball by Brigid BrophyFifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and ??The Crown Princess and Other Stories by Brigid Brophy“Spleen” by BeaudelaireDeath in Venice by Thomas Mann“As You Like It” by William ShakespeareSupport the showFor episodes and show notes, visit: LostLadiesofLit.comSubscribe to our substack newsletter. Follow us on instagram @lostladiesoflit. Email us: Contact — Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast

In this episode, we discuss Chapter 6 of Cusk's Outline alongside an essay by Murdoch called The Idea of Perfection. In this essay, Murdoch argues that the way we pay attention to the world is ethically significant. We talk about how Cusk's narrator attends to the world, and what this leads the reader to infer about her character and sense of self. Speaker names: • Dr. Scarlett Baron, Associate Professor in the English Department at UCL. • Alice Harberd, PhD Student in the Philosophy Department at UCL.

Miles is joined by Lucy Oulton (University of Chichester) to discuss her new book, Iris Murdoch's Wild Imagination: Nature and the Environment (Palgrave, 2025). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-87833-6 This book presents the first ecocritical study of novelist, philosopher, poet and public intellectual Iris Murdoch (1919–1999). It brings her love of the natural world into the light, arguing for its critical significance when Murdoch conveys an awareness of intricately interconnected ecologies through her work: an awareness that anticipates the motivations and concerns of modern-day environmental humanities. The book is the first of its kind to assess some of Murdoch's poems, seen as early articulation of the environmental imagination that finds recurrent expression in her novels, philosophical writings and personal journals throughout her writing life. This book offers a significant entry point for a new research direction in Murdoch studies by explicating her unique perspective on the natural world. Lucy Oulton is a Research Associate at the Iris Murdoch Research Centre, University of Chichester, UK. She is an Editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, to which she has also contributed.

In this episode Miles is joined by joined by Mark Hopwood, Associate Professor of Philosophy, from the University of Sewanee, USA to discuss his new book – which has just been published – The Moral Philosophy of Iris Murdoch. This is his first monograph since he published the co-edited volume that he's perhaps best known for in Murdoch circles, the magisterial Murdochian Mind in 2022. Both books published by Routledge. https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Moral-Philosophy-of-Iris-Murdoch-by-Mark-Hopwood/9780367819576 Examining the role of vision, imagination, love, goodness, and transcendence in Murdoch's work, The Moral Philosophy of Iris Murdoch presents a compelling and original argument that she is one of the major moral philosophers of the twentieth century.

More at https://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/iris-murdoch. Iris Murdoch may be best known for her works of fiction, but her philosophical contributions were equally significant. A moral realist influenced by Plato and Simone Weil, she developed theories in virtue ethics and care ethics. So what is the relationship between Murdoch's works of fiction and her philosophical writings? Why did she believe that "nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous"? And given that, why did she think human life has no purpose? Josh and Ray explore Murdoch's life and thought with Eva-Maria Düringer from the University of Tübingen, author of "Evaluating Emotions."

In this, her first public lecture, Dr Maria Peacock discusses Iris Murdoch's search for home using examples from her novels and biography. This lecture was given at the University of Chichester on Saturday 29th March, 2025.

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3549: Spending time in nature and reconnecting with cherished childhood places can offer a profound shift in perspective. Rachel Macy Stafford reflects on how revisiting her aunt and uncle's home after decades helped her rediscover the power of "unselfing," turning attention outward to embrace the beauty of the world beyond personal worries. By zooming out, immersing in nature, and appreciating life's vastness, we can find strength and clarity in unexpected ways. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.handsfreemama.com/2023/08/25/i-hope-you-feel-small-the-surprising-upside-of-unselfing/ Quotes to ponder: "This card reminded me of your long driveway. Every time we pulled into the driveway leading up to your house, my heart raced with excitement and happiness." "At home, I tended to make myself the center of my own universe, so naturally, everything felt big and overwhelming. But at my aunt's house, I was immersed in the beauty of nature using all of my senses." "Experiences that refresh our energies, calm our anxieties, and nurture our well-being are more accessible than we might think." Episode references: The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch: https://www.amazon.com/Sovereignty-Good-Iris-Murdoch/dp/0415253993 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3549: Spending time in nature and reconnecting with cherished childhood places can offer a profound shift in perspective. Rachel Macy Stafford reflects on how revisiting her aunt and uncle's home after decades helped her rediscover the power of "unselfing," turning attention outward to embrace the beauty of the world beyond personal worries. By zooming out, immersing in nature, and appreciating life's vastness, we can find strength and clarity in unexpected ways. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.handsfreemama.com/2023/08/25/i-hope-you-feel-small-the-surprising-upside-of-unselfing/ Quotes to ponder: "This card reminded me of your long driveway. Every time we pulled into the driveway leading up to your house, my heart raced with excitement and happiness." "At home, I tended to make myself the center of my own universe, so naturally, everything felt big and overwhelming. But at my aunt's house, I was immersed in the beauty of nature using all of my senses." "Experiences that refresh our energies, calm our anxieties, and nurture our well-being are more accessible than we might think." Episode references: The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch: https://www.amazon.com/Sovereignty-Good-Iris-Murdoch/dp/0415253993 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode Miles is joined by Prof. Bridget Clarke (University of Montana) to discuss her new book, entitled ‘Iris Murdoch' in the Cambridge Elements, Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy series from Cambridge University Press. https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Iris-Murdoch-by-Bridget-Clarke/9781009358149 Bridget is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana and her research interests include the History of Ethics, Moral Psychology and, of course, Iris Murdoch, who she has been working on for the past twenty years or more. This new book, however, is her first monograph dedicated solely to Murdoch work. To access Iris Murdoch's Review of Dr Zhivago - mentioned at the end of the podcast - use this link: https://mailadminchiac-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/m_leeson_chi_ac_uk/ESChvUwQ5xpIiacFzothi7QB8eT3VRQavDZRT83RCUuvVg?e=FEEhQe

durée : 00:59:01 - Avec philosophie - par : Géraldine Mosna-Savoye, Antoine Ravon - À travers ses romans et sa réflexion philosophique, Iris Murdoch explore des thèmes tels que la liberté, les relations humaines, le pouvoir des structures sociales, tout en donnant une voix complexe aux expériences féminines. En quoi consiste la voie féministe subtile indiquée par Iris Murdoch ? - réalisation : Nicolas Berger - invités : Camille Braune Doctorante en philosophie à l'université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

durée : 00:59:04 - Avec philosophie - par : Géraldine Mosna-Savoye, Antoine Ravon - En 1970, Iris Murdoch publie "La souveraineté du Bien", ouvrage marqué par ses lectures de Platon, de Wittgenstein ou encore de Simone Weil. Comment la conception du Bien d'Iris Murdoch nous donne-t-elle les clés afin de nous rendre (moralement) meilleurs ? - réalisation : Nicolas Berger - invités : Emmanuel Halais