ABSTRACT
I present Murdoch’s The Fire and the Sun as addressing the question ‘whether Plato may not have been in some ways right to be so suspicious of art’. So doing, I tell a story that connects the two apparent themes of this extended and elusive essay, art and metaphysics. In a key passage of Murdoch’s text, Ryle is remembered to us as a Homer, thereby recalling Socratic criticism of Homer into a discussion of this Plato critic, and of exegetes altogether. Is Plato then an Odysseus, or a Nestor? How shall we handle the art and the artist in such questions? Is there some way to ‘defend art’, if we cannot get it off the main charge?
