‘Ontological’ arguments from experience: Daniel A. Dombrowski, Iris Murdoch, and the nature of divine reality

Burns, Elizabeth

doi:10.1017/s0034412512000340

Cited by 2 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…That is not the kind of interpretation we offer here, but for a proposal along these lines, see Lipscomb (2020;. xvii Burns (2013) suggests a different reading on which Murdoch offers two arguments here, one from the ubiquity of goodness and another from degrees of goodness. xviii For more on this broadening of the moral, see the essays by Blum (1986), Diamond (1996), Taylor (1996), andBagnoli (2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…That is not the kind of interpretation we offer here, but for a proposal along these lines, seeLipscomb (2020Lipscomb ( , 2021. 17Burns (2013) suggests a different reading on which Murdoch offers two arguments here, one from the ubiquity of goodness and another from degrees of goodness.18 For more on this broadening of the moral, see the essays byBlum (1986),Diamond (1996),Taylor (1996), andBagnoli (2012).19 SeeMurdoch's "Vision and Choice in Morality" (1956) for further discussion of the centrality of vision to our moral life. "Vision" here is not meant in terms of literal visual perception, but our wider grasp of the world.20 Antonaccio (2003Antonaccio ( , 2012 seems to understand degrees of goodness in a similar way.21 For an alternative view, see Broackes, who suggests instead that Murdoch may think of 'good' as having 'its primary application only in the domain of persons' and that there may be a 'deep Kantianism' to Murdoch's metaphysics(Broackes, 2012, p. 68).22 The foregoing does not entail that there is only a single way in which every object deserves to be seen.…”

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confidence: 89%

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Murdoch's ontological argument

Mason

Dougherty

2022

European J of Philosophy

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The image of God plays a conspicuous role in Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy. Like many of her contemporaries, she sees the idea of God as one which we can no longer be truly comfortable with -one which, in the words of Paul Tillich, has come to feel like a 'strange body' imposed on the human mind, or else like a simple impossibility. ii Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Murdoch's attempts to reinvigorate morality in the absence of God do not do away with every aspect of the idea of God. She thinks that we have no need to abandon moral metaphysics in favour of moral anthropology or the analysis of moral language, for instance; and more generally, she disagrees with Nietzsche that without God we must now be plunging through an infinite nothing, with no up or down (Nietzsche, 1887, §125), such that we need to take a wholly different track from our thought about morality pre-mort Dieu. The moral philosopher, she believes, can and must still be a metaphysician, even a sort of theologian.The most direct exemplification of this quasi-religious approach to morality is Murdoch's re-fashioning of St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God as an ontological argument for the existence of the Good. Against contemporary popular opinion of Anselm's argument, she believes that the argument essentially succeeds -that it does nearly all that it's meant to do, just not in the way that it is popularly thought to do it, and not in service of the particular conclusion (about God) that Anselm intended. iii Our aim in the present paper is to explain Murdoch's conception of Anselm's argument and to show how she makes use of it for her own conclusion that the Good exists. More generally, as Kieran Setiya mentions in another piece on Murdoch, our aim is not so much to provide a definitive evaluation of her argument, as to make it 'plausible, intelligible, and, as far as possible, argumentatively sharp' (Setiya, 2013, p. 2). In doing Pre-print. Please cite published version, forthcoming in European Journal of Philosophy.2 so, we hope to illuminate some of the ways in which she is philosophically distinctive but also to suggest that her argument is one that contemporary moral philosophers should take seriously. iv We begin in §1 by outlining Murdoch's distinctive understanding of Anselm's argument.In §2 we compare her notion of the Good with the traditional notion of God. In §3 we offer an initial sketch of Murdoch's ontological argument, and in subsequent sections we examine its key moves. We begin to do so in §4 by examining an idea at the core of her argument -'degrees of goodness'. In §5 we explore how degrees of goodness are supposed to point us toward the idea of perfection, or the Good. And in §6 we examine the sense in which Murdoch believes that the Good is necessary. In doing so, we aim to shed light on these key Murdochian ideas, as well as to explain how they come together in her own ontological argument. v Murdoch on AnselmMost newcomers to Anselm's argument are introduced to it by way of contrast w...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

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confidence: 89%

Murdoch's ontological argument

Mason

Dougherty

2022

European J of Philosophy

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“…Although Murdoch acknowledges "the fundamentally religious nature of Plato's objections to art…Art is dangerous [for Plato] chiefly because it apes the spiritual and subtly disguises and trivializes it" ( [5], p. 65), she thinks that "Plato never did justice to the unique truth-conveying capacities of 4 I have discussed this argument in [6]. 5 I am concerned here only with Murdoch's definition of great art, and her understanding of its function.…”

Section: Murdoch's Five Ways From Art To Religionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such texts, she thinks, fail to grasp the uniqueness of the particular, and cannot convey the complexity of the "matter of the practical" and "the active adventure of the deliberative intelligence, the 'yearnings of thought and excursions of sympathy' that make up much of our actual moral life?" ( [16], p. 142, quoting [17], II.330) 6 .…”

Section: Art As a "Hall Of Reflection"mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Images of Reality: Iris Murdoch’s Five Ways from Art to Religion

Burns

2015

Religions

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

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‘Ontological’ arguments from experience: Daniel A. Dombrowski, Iris Murdoch, and the nature of divine reality

Cited by 2 publications

References 14 publications

Murdoch's ontological argument

Murdoch's ontological argument

Images of Reality: Iris Murdoch’s Five Ways from Art to Religion

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