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In Murdoch on Truth and Love, a volume in Palgrave Macmillan’s “Philosophy in Depth” series, Gary Browning points out that Iris Murdoch’s “paradoxical equation of truth with love” reveals her understanding of “the roles of both reason and emotion in shaping moral conduct” (6). Murdoch herself explains that “life is a spiritual pilgrimage inspired by the disturbing magnetism of truth, involving ipso facto a purification of energy and desire in the light of a vision of what is good. The good and just life is thus a process of clarification, a movement toward selfless lucidity, guided by ideas of perfection which are objects of love” (Murdoch 23). Along with contributors, Browning shows how Murdoch’s concepts of truth and love can be interpreted from a variety of perspectives including art, linguistics, politics, and morality. This book makes a major contribution to the latest approaches to Murdoch and broadens scholarly understanding of her philosophical dimension from thinking about the single and standardized idea of the Platonic Good to the ambivalent but dynamic balance of truth and love.
The book features an introduction by Browning followed by eight chapters, all new essays written by various contributors to the collection. Tracing back to Plato, Browning justifies the interplay of truth and love as the mot juste of Murdoch’s multidimensional concerns. The strength of the study lies in its multiplicity of lenses. The collection’s contributors are “diverse and have backgrounds in different traditions of scholarship” (6), which enables them to access the book’s themes from more angles than readers might expect. This multiplicity also allows the collection to probe all...