What is it about?

In this paper I try to show: that Murdoch’s concern in distancing herself from the "Natural Law moralists" group is to ‘save the contingent’; that Thomas Aquinas’s moral philosophy, if properly understood, is not a prison in which the individual has no role as a moral agent, and is reduced to a mere executor of an entirely given system; finally that there is, therefore, much more closeness between Thomas and Murdoch than she could have believed.

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Why is it important?

If it’s true that the main aim of Murdoch’s moral philosophy is that of confuting the liberal-existentialist view, which conceives the individual as an empty and solitary locus of freedom capable of “flying in the face of the facts”, thus emphasizing his loneliness, an equal effort is devoted to avoiding a vision in which the individual is absorbed in a given theoretical framework or a ‘system’. If Murdoch’s critique to the Liberal view is quite well known, much less attention has been given, to my knowledge, to an examination of her fundamental concern for the safeguard of the contingent from a system which risks to unify it into a form, to the point of cancelling it. This is nevertheless a constant guideline of her thought, present both in her ethical and metaphysical reflections and in her observations regarding literary criticism and the qualities of a good novelist.

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This page is a summary of: Saving the Contingent. A Dialogue Between Iris Murdoch and Aquinas*, New Blackfriars, October 2015, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/nbfr.12175.
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