ABSTRACT
Iris Murdoch had a complicated view of Ludwig Wittgenstein, both personally and philosophically. Her personal impression of Wittgenstein ambivalent; she found Wittgenstein attractive and striking, but she also perceived him as almost demonic. Similarly, Murdoch’s view of Wittgenstein’s works oscillated between positive acknowledgement and negative evaluation. She often mentioned his philosophy but in the roles of both ally and opponent. In this chapter, I aim to illuminate this ambivalence in three ways. First, I map the common ground of Murdoch’s and Wittgenstein’s thinking and identify the many affinities between their views of philosophical method, especially their shared understanding of the primary task of philosophy as that of describing and clarifying the ordinary. Second, I retrace Murdoch’s critique of Wittgenstein’s early notions of ethics and the self, as well as her view of how these influenced her contemporaries in moral philosophy. Finally, I explore how Murdoch’s notion of philosophy as making sense of the ordinary allowed her to develop her revolutionary views of the self and moral attention, with a special focus on its implications for the activity of moral philosophy itself.
