Iris Murdoch

Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels and taught philosophy at Oxford, and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is the long late statement of the position running underneath both. Her argument is that moral philosophy went wrong by putting the will at the heart of ethics, when what matters is attention: the slow, unselfish work of seeing another person accurately, which she thought art and love train better than reasoning does. The book is difficult and unsystematic, drawing on Plato, Simone Weil, Wittgenstein and Kant without settling into any of them. It appeared in 1992, a few years before Alzheimer's ended her working life.