Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Penguin Philosophy S.) by Iris Murdoch

This guide to morals is the culmination of the author's lifetime of work in philosophy. The author is concerned with the humanistic part of the history of philosophy, Plato to structuralism, and how it bears on our thoughts and feelings about our lives, our moral lives. She shows how our conception of morality is bound up with and in our worlds, not separate from them, not values separated from facts. More particularly, the subject in its first part includes consciousness, the nature of reality, the self-freedom. In its second part the subject is a conception of morality as somehow bound up with and in our worlds, not separate from them, not values separated from facts. This enterprise of the book, and its title, recall Kant's great groundwork of metaphysic morals. It is not philosophy of any of the dominant kinds in the English language its subject-matter is grander and more elusive, and it is much more literary, allusive, historical and spiritual. There are also extended commentaries on particular philosophers, including Schopenhauer, as well as a section on art, and some reflections on the novel, none of them personal or about the author's novels.