Iris Murdoch is better known to most as a novelist than as a philosopher, but she was a philosopher first, and her essays and books on ethics are quietly remarkable: a great many philosophers seem to have read them, and even to have been deeply affected by them, but there is surprisingly little philosophy-focused (rather than literary-focused) writing on her work, and even less that takes seriously her sweeping, and philosophically quite radical, vision of moral life. In particular, very few people have tried to seriously tackle her reading of Plato, and especially what she has to say about the Form of the Good. Murdoch evidently believes in the Good – not just goodness, but the Good, itself by itself, in some kind of metaphysically significant sense; but she also doesn't want to add it in as an additional 'spooky' metaphysical entity. Many scholars of Murdoch's work have tried to 'pin down' Murdoch into one of these ways of talking. I want to put together a metaphysics which will make sense of both.
Other research interests:
What they call 'ethics, broadly conceived'. Scholastic, Buddhist, and Pragmatist philosophy, modern virtue ethics, and phenomenology, all with an eye to personal ethics. Simone Weil. And Plato, always Plato.
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