Landmark: Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2019
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Sweet and guests look at the thought and writing of Iris Murdoch 100 years on from her birth, re-reading her work of moral philosophy she published in 1970, drawing on lectures she had given at universities in England and America. With Lucy Bolton, who has written about Iris Murdoch, philosophy and cinema, novelist and critic Bidisha, and friend of Iris Murdoch Peter J Conradi, who is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kingston.
The Iris Murdoch Research Centre is at the University of Chichester. The Centenary Conference takes place 13 - 15 July 2019 at St Anne’s College, Oxford. The project womeninparenthesis is currently asking members of the public to send a postcard to Iris ttps://www.philosophybypostcard.com/ - you can hear more about it in this Free Thinking discussion on rewriting 20th-century British philosophy https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000r9b
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
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| 0:33.3 | Hello, I'm Matthew Sweet. Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion |
| 0:39.3 | programme, which brings together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate. |
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| 0:51.1 | there, please rate and reviewers. It'll help other people find us. |
| 0:55.7 | Here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine that it's 1970. Imagine that you are Iris Murdoch, |
| 1:03.0 | novelist, philosopher, fag smoker, former communist, future dame of the British Empire, |
| 1:08.9 | dabbler in occultism and Buddhism. |
| 1:11.7 | Imagine that you were trying to find a school of philosophy that will allow you to lead a good |
| 1:17.0 | life. You could be an existentialist and believe in the radical freedom of the human individual, |
| 1:23.7 | but Jean-Paul Sartre, the father of existentialism, is marching with the Maoists. |
| 1:28.6 | So what else? One of those new schools of French philosophy, perhaps, busily arguing the human |
| 1:34.4 | subject out of existence. Or maybe like the inhabitants of Murdoch's fiction, you could find |
| 1:40.6 | meaning in being elapsed something, an ex-nun, a former priest, a wayward Jesuit. |
| 1:47.6 | In a way, we don't have to imagine. Murdoch's study of 1970, The Sovereignty of Good, does some of the work for us. |
| 1:55.2 | It's a user-friendly 100-page book of moral philosophy that will be our pole star as we navigate through |
| 2:02.8 | Murdoch's ideas, fiction and life, a hundred years after she came into the world. |
| 2:08.2 | Our navigators are the novelist Bidisha, Lucy Bolton, philosopher and film scholar, |
| 2:13.8 | an author of contemporary cinema and the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and Peter J. Conradi, |
| 2:19.4 | who knew Murdoch well and published an unsurpassed biography of her two years after her death |
... |
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