ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Murdoch’s novels in connection with her philosophy and shows how the novels both portray and enact the moral paradox that Murdoch’s philosophy highlights: the idea that moral progress cannot take place by willing (to learn or teach), but that it needs to take place through love, when any attempt to improve has been relinquished. Like Dostoevsky, in the novels Murdoch puts to the test her own vision, mocking it. At the same time, fiction can be a path to moral progress thanks to its ability to make us confront something irreducibly other—a prominent theme in Murdoch’s philosophy.
