ABSTRACT
To offer a brief guide to such a difficult work may look foolhardy, but this chapter attempts to offer some maps and notes on landmarks that may help an explorer. Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein and Simone Weil are main figures in the background; Hare, Hampshire and Sartre in the foreground—as Murdoch’s opposition. Special attention is given to Murdoch’s conception of herself as inventor—or modifier—of concepts, and how that contributes to her development of a conception of a moral reality and of us as imperfect but improvable perceivers of it. A map is given of some of oppositions involved in the great clash of world systems (broadly, the Humean system and Murdoch’s non-dogmatic ‘naturalism’) enacted in ‘The Idea of Perfection’. Particularly important in the other two essays of the book are the interpretations Murdoch gives to ‘goodness’ (as accuracy of perception) and the ‘transcendence’ of goodness. Why is Murdoch hard? Perhaps because she is stretching received concepts; perhaps because she is remaking philosophical language; perhaps because she is both an insider and an outsider in her philosophical habitat.
