The Iris Murdoch Society podcast

In this episode Miles is joined by Cathy Mason (Central European University, Vienna) to discuss her new book, 'Iris Murdoch's Moral Philosophy: Reframing the True, the Real, and the Good'.

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Iris-Murdochs-Moral-Philosophy-by-Cathy-Mason/9780198940432

Cathy Mason is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Central European University, Vienna and her main areas of research interest are Ethics, Epistemology (especially Moral Epistemology), Aesthetics, and Iris Murdoch's philosophical writing (particularly at the points where these areas converge). Her previous work has focused on the moral phenomena of everyday life, often drawing on virtue theory. She has written about a variety of topics such as friendship, love, mourning, forgiveness, hope and humility. Prior to coming to CEU, she held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Cambridge – where she studied for her PhD - and taught at the Universities of Oxford and Birmingham.

In this episode we are returning to our close reading of the collection Existentialists and Mystics. For the third podcast of our mini-series, we’ll be discussing Murdoch's review of Gabriel Marcel’s ‘The Image of Mind’ and her essay ‘The Existential Political Myth’. The first is a review of The Mystery of Being by Marcel from 1951 – the first volume of his published volume of Gifford Lectures. Murdoch’s essay 'The Existential Political Myth' was first published in Socratic Digest in 1952.

Joining me today is Samuel Filby who was the guest on the first episode of this mini series. He is currently working on his PhD thesis on Murdoch at Northwestern University, Chicago. His work focuses on Murdoch’s aesthetics and moral psychology.

In this 75th Episode Special, Miles is joined by Daniel Read (Kingston University, UK) to answer questions from the Iris Murdoch Society and via the social media channels.

You can find out much more, and join the society, here: www.irismurdochsociety.org.uk

The questions sent in are:

1. Could Iris Murdoch drive?
2. How should Murdoch’s philosophical seriousness be reassessed in light of recent scholarship on her as a public intellectual?
3. In what ways did Murdoch’s Irish background shape her imagination, ethics, and sense of exile or belonging?
4. How has Murdoch’s relationship with religion and the sacred been represented differently in scholarship versus media portrayals?
5. How should Murdoch’s private life—especially her complex relationships—be integrated (or resisted) in critical interpretations of her novels?
6. What is Murdoch’s place within post-war British women’s writing, and why has she often been treated as an exception rather than part of a continuum?
7. How do contemporary debates about feminism, agency, and power reframe Murdoch’s representation of women?
8. Murdoch insists on the reality of the Good as something external and authoritative.
How might that claim speak to contemporary moral and political life, where moral language is often treated as subjective or unstable?
9. Murdoch’s late novels are often described as difficult, bewildering, even radically alien.
How should we read the strangeness of the late Murdoch: as decline, experiment, or metaphysical intensification?
10. What do you think is the most important unfinished task for Murdoch scholarship today?

In this lecture, given on Monday 15th December 2025, Dr Lucy Oulton (University of Chichester), Murdoch's enduring relationship with the figure of Peter Pan is discussed: her talk is titled '‘An Ousted Gabriel’: Iris Murdoch and the Enduring Allure of Peter Pan'

Wendy and Peter Pan, a stage adaptation of the J.M. Barrie novel Peter and Wendy, embraces a key detail from Barrie’s own childhood, dealing sensitively with the topic of child loss. The play foregrounds Wendy’s attempts to come to terms with the loss of a (third) brother, while her parents are overwhelmed by grief.

Iris Murdoch’s fascination with Peter Pan is well documented. Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe observe that she ‘most heavily depends on the Peter Pan myth […] in relationships which lack warmth, connections and love’. My talk focuses on three of Murdoch’s fictional daughters who attempt to fathom their own circumstances in a shifting state of adolescence. I explore Murdoch’s ideation of the girls in relation to this cultural icon, and her incisive understanding of what it means to grow up.
Lucy is a Associate at the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester and her first monograph, Iris Murdoch’s Wild Imagination: Nature and the Environment was published earlier this year. She is an editor of the Iris Murdoch Review and has lectured intentionally on Murdoch’s life and work.

In this episode Miles is joined by Frances White and Robert Cremins - both from the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester - to discuss Murdoch's final novel, Jackson's Dilemma.

Frances is the Deputy Director of the IMRC at Chichester and the author of many works on Murdoch, the most recent being the edited collection Iris Murdoch and the Western Theological Imagination (Palgrave, 2025) and Poems from An attic: Selected Poems 1936-1995 (Chatto and Windus, 2025).

Robert is a writer and was Senior Lecturer in the Honours College at the University of Houston, and the Faculty Director of Creative Works. A novelist, short story writer and literary critic, Robert has got a lifelong love of Murdoch’s fiction. He has recently co-edited North American special edition of the Iris Murdoch Review, published in November 2025, and is writing his PhD thesis at Chichester on the influence of Henry James on Murdoch.