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Iris Murdoch and Common Sense Or, What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

Hannah Marije Altorf
Hannah Marije Altorf*
Affiliation:
St. Mary's University
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Philosophy is one of the least inclusive disciplines in the humanities and this situation is changing only very slowly. In this article I consider how one of the women of the Wartime Quartet, Iris Murdoch, can help to challenge this situation. Taking my cue from feminist and philosophical practices, I focus on Murdoch's experience of being a woman and a philosopher and on the role experience plays in her philosophical writing. I argue that her thinking is best characterised with the notion of common sense or sensus communis. This term recognises her understanding of philosophy as based in experience and as a shared effort ‘to make sense of our life’, as Mary Midgley puts it.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 87: A Centenary Celebration: Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch , July 2020 , pp. 201 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2020

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Footnotes

On whether their originality had anything to do with their gender, I cannot make a final judgment, but I suspect that women are less prone to jump on to bandwagons than at least some of their male colleagues, and are also more reluctant to abandon common sense …1

1

Mary Warnock on Anscombe, Foot and Murdoch in A Memoir: People and Places (Duckbacks, 2002) 37.

References

2 Dotson, Kirstie, ‘Concrete Flowers: Contemplating the Profession of Philosophy’. Hypatia 26.2 (spring 2011), 403–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar,  406. The cartoon I am referring to can be found here: https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I0000eHEXGJ_wImQ.

3 Dotson, ‘Concrete Flowers’, op. cit. note 2, 407. Dotson speaks of diverse people and her concern is with black women in particular. I do not want to suggest that the problems facing different women are identical, but the question of whether their work is philosophy is not limited to one group. As I will show, it has been asked of Iris Murdoch's work.

4 The pioneering work of Maria Antonaccio must be mentioned here, both her monograph (Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch, Oxford University Press, 2000) and the collection of essays, which she edited with William Schweiker and which included the work of such prominent thinkers as Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond amongst others (Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, Chicago University Press, 1996). The most comprehensive study by a British thinker of her philosophical work which included Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals from around the same time is the chapter by Kerr, Fergus (Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity, S.P.C.K. Publishing, 1997)Google Scholar. There have been various introductions and studies of her novels of course, but their focus is obviously not the philosophical writing.

5 Wilson, A.N., Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (London: Hutchinson, 2003),  28Google Scholar. The rather defensive tone taken by consequent writings, arguing that Murdoch was indeed a serious philosopher, is further evidence to the initial disregard for her work. In the introduction to the 2012 collection of essays Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (which includes only two essays by philosophers working at British universities) Justin Broackes's writes: ‘There are people who suspect now, I think, that Murdoch was either not quite a serious and substantial philosopher or not quite a professional, recognized by her fellows’. ((Oxford University Press)  6). See also my reflections on Murdoch as a serious philosopher: ‘Iris Murdoch, or What It Means To Be A Serious Philosopher’, Daimoon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 60 (2013),  75–91.

6 Of course, they are not the only ones working on the quartet. See here especially the work of Benjamin Lipscomb. For more information on (In Parenthesis), see: http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/.

7 The distinction between analytical and continental philosophy and the notion of continent philosophy are not without their difficulties. See Critchley, Simon, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001),  1–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar and throughout.

8 Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, ’A Female School of Analytic Philosophy?: Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch’ [http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/PENN-trip-blog-post-script-1.pdf]

9 See ‘About’ [http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/about/]. Those insights and strategies are unfortunately needed in a discipline that still has surprising few women in top positions and that has been shocked by some very public cases of sexual harassment.

10 See for instance https://americanrestroom.org/potty-parity/.

11 Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance’. [http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/silencing-and-speaker-vulnerability-undoing-an-oppressive-form-of-wilful-ignorance/]

12 Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, ‘Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch: A Philosophical School’ (The Iris Murdoch Review, 2018,  39–49),  47.

13 Jonathan Wolff, ‘How can we end the male domination of philosophy?’ (The Guardian 26 November 2013 [https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/nov/26/modern-philosophy-sexism-needs-more-women]. See also ‘About’ [https://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/about/.]

14 Midgley, ‘The Golden Age of Female Philosophy’ (The Guardian 26 November 2013 [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/28/golden-age-female-philosophy-mary-midgley.]

15 See Midgley, ‘Four of us don't make a golden age’. Video available at http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/mary-midgley-16/.

16 The adjective ‘Female’ in ‘The Golden Age of Female Philosophy’, op. cit. note 14, creates additional difficulties. Does it mean philosophy by women or philosophy practised in a female way? The difficulty becomes even more obvious when contrasting ‘female philosophy’ to ‘male philosophy’.

17 Midgley, ‘We got quite indignant about that!’. [http://www.womeninparenthesis.co.uk/mary-midgley-15/].

18 Cp. Stefan Collini, ‘Browne's Gamble’: ‘The devoted university teachers of a generation or more ago who were widely read and kept up with recent scholarship, but who were not themselves prolific publishers, have in many cases been hounded into early retirement, to be replaced (if replaced at all) by younger colleagues who see research publications as the route to promotion and esteem, and who try to limit their commitment to undergraduate teaching as far as they can.’ (London Review of Books, vol 32.21 (4 November 2001),  23–25. [https://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n21/stefan-collini/brownes-gamble]

19 Helen Beebee and Jenny Saul, ‘Women in Philosophy in the UK’. [http://www.swipuk.org/notices/2011-09-08/Women%20in%20Philosophy%20in%20the%20UK%20%28BPA-SWIPUK%20Report%29.pdf]

20 Cp. Dotson, ‘Concrete Flowers’, op. cit. note 2, 408, 403 and also ‘How Is This Paper Philosophy?’, Comparative Philosophy 3.1 (2012),  3–29

21 See https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com. This website makes for depressing reading, when some of its greatest hits are ‘failure to take women seriously’ and ‘sexual harassment’. The site is actually aware of the fact that it may discourage women from entering the profession.

22 Linda Martín Alcoff, Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy (2003),  4–5. This collection is an important exception to the rule, containing the stories of twelve philosophers, all of whom are or have been employed by universities in the United States.

23 For a fuller description of and reflection on this method, see Altorf, Hannah Marije, ‘Dialogue or Discussion: Reflections on a Socratic Method’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 18.1 (2019),  60–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this article I comment too on the fact that the emphasis on experience is not always appreciated by the participants, especially philosophers.

24 See also Beebee, Helen, ‘Women and Deviance in Philosophy’, (Hutchinson, Katrina and Jenkins, Fiona (eds). Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change (Oxford University Press,  63–73)Google Scholar and Marilyn Friedman (op. cit. 39–60). See especially  28: ‘This constant responsiveness to objections and criticism, integrated into the very nature and presentation of philosophical work, may promote an atmosphere in which philosophers tend to avoid investing themselves too deeply in their philosophical positions lest they have to give those up at the next go-round. In this way, it is easy to regard philosophy as a game or contest rather than a genuine search for wisdom.’

25 Cp. Michèle le Doeuff, Hipparchia's Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc. (Blackwell, 1991) 5–6.

26 Midgley, Mary, What is Philosophy For? (Bloomsbury 2018), 11Google Scholar.

27 Midgley, Mary, ‘Philosophical Plumbing’. Utopias, Dolphins and Computers (Routledge 1996), 1–14Google Scholar. See especially 14: ‘it might well pay us to be less interested in what philosophy can do for our dignity, and more aware of the shocking malfunctions for which it is an essential remedy.’

28 Hale, Sheila, ‘Interview from “Women Writers Now: Their Approach and Their Apprenticeship”’. (Dooley, Gillian (Ed.), From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. University of South Carolina Press, 2003,  30–32Google Scholar. The quotation is from 32).

29 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Vintage, 1997,  13). Murdoch probably read the French text. The phrase is similar in French.

30 ‘I am not interested in the “woman's world” or the assertion of a “female viewpoint”. This is often rather an artificial idea and can in fact injure the promotion of rights. We want to join the human race, not invent a new separatism…” (Jack I. Biles, ‘An Interview with Iris Murdoch, (Dooley (ed.) op. cit. note 28. 56–69. The quotation is from 61–62.)

31 See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5503059/Oxford-University-feminise-philosophy-reading-lists.html; cp. https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2018/03/27/philosophy-at-oxford-too-many-men/.

32 Lucas Cahal, comment on https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/03/14/oxford-university-set-feminise-curriculum-requesting-inclusion/

33 See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5503059/Oxford-University-feminise-philosophy-reading-lists.html.

34 Cp. Dotson, ‘Concrete Flowers’, op. cit. note 2, 407.

35 Cherwell, the Oxford University student newspaper, 13 March 2018 [https://cherwell.org/2018/03/13/undergrad-paper-in-feminist-philosophy-to-be-introduced/.]

36 Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (Vintage, 2001), 76Google Scholar.

37 See Altorf, Marije, Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining (Continuum, 2008)  2–6Google Scholar.

38 Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life. (HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001)  82, quoting Fera Varnell, the Dean of Somerville. See also Altorf, Marije, ‘After Cursing the Library: Iris Murdoch and the (In)visibility of Women in Philosophy’. Hypatia 26–2 (2011),  384–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this article I offer a critical reading of the three biographies/memoirs that were published shortly after Murdoch's death in 1999 (the memoirs by her husband John Bayley, the biography by Peter Conradi and A.N. Wilson).

39 Conradi op. cit., 256.

40 See Altorf, Marije, ‘Reassessing Iris Murdoch in the Light of Feminist Philosophy: Michèle le Doeuff and the Philosophical Imaginary.’ Rowe, Anne (ed.), Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 175–186CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Cp. Le Doeuff, op. cit. note 25, 9–10.

42 On rereading Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Penguin, 1992) recently, I recognised a short quotation from  497 and of course the very last quote,  512.

43 See the interview with M. Le Gros, quoted in Hilda Spear, Iris Murdoch (Palgrave, 2006),  9.

44 Especially Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), her Gifford lectures from 1982, has puzzled readers even since it was first published. For a wonderful collection of illuminating articles in the work, see Hämäläinen, Nora, Doolley, Gillian (eds.), Reading Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 This aspect was recently brought to my attention again in a lecture by Mark Hopwood, Pardubice 8 June 2019.

46 Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, op. cit. note 36,  1.

47 Murdoch, op. cit. note 36, 47.

48 Murdoch, op. cit. note 36,  75.

49 Murdoch ‘Thinking and Language’, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Edited and with a Preface by Peter Conradi. Foreword by George Steiner. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997) 33–42. The quotation is from 33.

50 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, op. cit. note 42,  429.

51 Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good, op. cit. note 36, 13

52 See Conradi, op. cit. note 38  244. Cp. too Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg. (Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

53 Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, op. cit. note 42,  429.

54 Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1957),  24Google Scholar.

55 Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman, ‘A Female School of Academic Philosophy?’, op. cit. note 8.

56 Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places, op. cit. note 1, 37.

57 Altorf, ‘After Cursing the Library’, op. cit. note 38.

58 Thomas Reid as quoted in Nichols, Ryan and Gidein Yaffe, ‘Thomas Reid’, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition) [https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/reid/].

59 Arendt uses different terms for common sense (‘common sense’, Gesunder Menschenverstand, le bon sense, sensus communis, Gemeinsinn). See Borren, Marieke, ‘A Sense of the World: Hannah Arendt's Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense’. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21(2) (2013),  22–255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 There are, as far as I know, very few references to Arendt in Murdoch's writing. Nevertheless, there are important connections between the two thinkers. See White, Frances ‘Iris Murdoch and Hannah Arendt: Two Women in Dark Times’. Roberts, M. F. Simone and Scott-Bauman, Alison (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination. McFarland, (2010) 13–33Google Scholar.

61 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Arendt op. cit.,  50.  The English language has at least two expressions for this experience of losing one's sense of reality, because one is longer certain that others see and hear what we see and hear: the elephant in the room and gaslighting.

63 Borren, op. cit. note 58,  226–7. Borren argues that much of this debate is based around the question of whether Arendt's Kant-lectures are exegesis or present her own thinking and position.

64 Borren, op. cit. note 58,  247.

65 Arendt, Hannah, ’Philosophy and Politics (Social Research 71.3 (2004),  427–454)Google Scholar,  434–435: ‘Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that the friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more common to them.’

66 See Dotson, ‘Concrete Flowers’  op.cit. note 2, on the prominence of the adversarial method.

67 I dedicate this article to Pamela Sue Anderson, whom I still miss very much. I like to thank audiences in  Uppsala, London and Durham for their comments to earlier versions. Thanks also to my colleague Yasemin J. Erden for her careful feedback to an earlier version and for all those years in which we worked together to create and maintain a very good, pluralistic philosophy programme.