Iris also wrote a philosphical tome, from memory, ...

2008-05-16T14:54:00.000+10:00

Iris also wrote a philosphical tome, from memory, before she succumbed to Alzheimer's disease. The novel does give a canvas for moral exploration; but I wonder at the results. Do novels represent experiments where different moral responses can be tested? Or do they hold up options in a formally a-moral manner? Is American Psycho a practical textbook?
I'm not really a novel reader, myself (despite the encouragment to do so at a Creation Science seminar in Brisbane in 1976: Life Literature and World View), but the little I have read typically comes up to a moral epistemological wall formed by the implicit materialism that rides on axiomatic acceptance of evolutionary theory. The connundrum is that, all said and done, all bets are off in the soup of random material interaction, where there is no final significance or moral gradation to anything. Yet, no sane person lives as thought life can be so characterised.
Theistic evolution fails to straddle the chasm because it attempts to make an unnatural graft of contrary ontological frameworks: one where God is a basic belief, and the other where not-God is a basic belief.

And she can be very funny: in A Severed Head and T...

2008-05-15T06:34:00.000+10:00

And she can be very funny: in A Severed Head and The Black Prince, for example.

Comments on The Blogging Parson: Iris Murdoch

Iris also wrote a philosphical tome, from memory, ...

And she can be very funny: in A Severed Head and T...