Online Zoom Forum: Iris Murdoch: The Spiritual, Ethical and Artistic Vision in Her Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 16 December 2026.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 15 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Simon Barrow:
Bio: Simon Barrow is a writer, commentator, poet, educator and researcher with wide experience in politics, public issues, media, organisational change, ethics and religion/beliefs. He was director of the think-tank Ekklesia from 2005-2024. Before that he worked in media and adult theological education. From 2000-2005 he was assistant general secretary of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland. His latest book is Beyond Our Means: Poetry, Prose and Blue Runes (Siglum, 2025) and will be followed by Against the Religion of Power: Telling a Different Christian Story (Ekklesia Publishing, April 2026). He also writes for the Edinburgh Music Review.
Speakers:
Dr Silvia Caprioglio Panizza:
Title: Murdoch's Secular Mysticism.
Description: In her philosophical writings, Murdoch makes a case for the importance of spirituality, for a sense of transcendence and the desire for something absolute. At the same time, Murdoch denies the existence of God. This raises both theoretical questions – How are we to understand transcendence and the absolute without divinity in Murdoch's view? – and practical questions – How do we reconcylce a mystical ethics with naturalism? – that I aim to address in this short talk.
Bio: Silvia Caprioglio Panizza is a philosopher working on moral psychology, meta ethics and animal ethics currently based at the Messerli Centre in Vienna. She is the author of The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil (Routledge 2022), co-editor of The Murdochian Mind (Routledge 2022), and co-editor and co-translator of Simone Weil's literary works (Bloomsbury 2019 and 2023)
Prof Megan J. Laverty:
Title: Ordinary Saintliness and Everyday Mysticism.
Description: Beginning with an account of Murdoch's everyday mysticism, I examine her remarks on the saint. I explore her comparison of saints with great artists, tragic literary figures, and good individuals, asking what these comparisons reveal about Murdoch's understanding of saintliness and its place in her moral philosophy. I conclude with some reflections on why goodness is both necessary and hard to picture.
Bio. Megan J. Laverty is Professor and Director of the Philosophy and Education Program at Teachers College. Her publications on Iris Murdoch include Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of Her Romantic Vision (Bloomsbury, 2007), as well as chapters in Reading Iris Murdoch Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), The Murdochian Mind (Routledge, 2022), and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Iris Murdoch.
Dr Scott H. Moore:
Title: Freedom and Obedience in Iris Murdoch.
Description: A commonplace notion of “obedience” conjures images of dutiful children obeying their parents or law-abiding citizens obeying laws and regulations. Even a well-trained dog might be described as being “obedient." In such cases, “being obedient” seems to mean that these children and citizens (and dogs) have given up their “freedom" to do as they might desire. Iris Murdoch, however, understands authentic freedom as “something very much more like ‘obedience.’” According to Murdoch, "This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand.” This view seems deeply counter-intuitive, but it is central to her overall moral philosophy and her view of human flourishing. I will attempt to explain this curious notion of freedom and obedience as she presents it in both her philosophical works and in her fiction.
Bio: Scott H. Moore is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Great Texts and Associate Dean in the Honors College at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, USA. He is the author of numerous essays and most recently the books How to Burn a Goat: Farming with the Philosophers, and the editor of a new edition of Petrarch’s The Life of Solitude. Moore's recent work focuses on the thought of the British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch and the American agrarian author Wendell Berry.
Dr Lesley Jamieson:
Title: Murdoch Against Meritocratic Love.
Description: Should love be meritocratic? According to the Qualities View, love is ideally a rational response to another person's love-worthy qualities—their charms, talents, and virtues. While Iris Murdoch has been recruited as an ally to such views, I argue that this is a mistake. In this talk, I outline what Murdoch thinks we can learn about love at its best by attending to the works of nineteenth-century realist novels like Tolstoy. Doing so reveals that Murdoch celebrates love that is responsive to others’ value qua human beings—idiosyncratic, imperfect, sometimes positively tiresome creatures. It does not rank them according to their merits and demerits.
Bio: Lesley Jamieson is an assistant professor and researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value at the University of Pardubice (Czechia). She is the author of Iris Murdoch's Practical Metaphysics: A Guide to her Early Writings (2023) and a number of academic journal article articles discussing Iris Murdoch's views on love, attention, escapism, and the philosophy of mind
Dr Michela Dianetti:
Title: Expanding the “nothing” Between Existentialists and Mystics in Iris Murdoch’s Radio-opera The One Alone.
Description: In this talk, I explore Murdoch’s distinction between existentialists and mystics within her “literary ethics of attention” by opposing her interpretation of the Weilian concept of the void to Sartre’s idea of nothingness. Murdoch’s distance from Sartre was facilitated by, (if not the result of) her attraction to Weil in the late 40s, beginning of the 50s. In her 1987 radio-opera The One Alone, one of the characters speaks the following: ‘There is a nothing which is simply deprivation, / Bitterness and remorse and negation. / There is another nothing which is real / And full of pain, but if you can, / Full of joy as well’ (The One Alone, Section 2). I argue that in these lines Murdoch is playing with the opposition she finds between Sartre’s nothingness and Weil’s void, which I, in turn, expand and connect to her view on existentialists on one side, and mystics and the role of saint-like figures on the other within her “mystical realism”.
Bio: Dr Michela Dianetti is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Galway, funded by Research Ireland, and an NUI Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research and teaching focus on philosophy of literature and on Philosophy for Children and Communities. During her doctoral thesis, “Against Unreality: A Literary Ethics of Attention with Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Elsa Morante,” she received the 2022 Iris Murdoch Society’s Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund Fellowship for Early-Career Scholars, and in 2024 she co-curated the exhibition (Un)Real Ireland, which explored Murdoch’s relationship with Ireland. She is co-founder of AIRE Research Collective, a public philosophy collective inspired by Weil and Murdoch, which brings philosophical dialogue and art engagement into public spaces, particularly around the climate crisis. She serves on the board of the Irish Philosophical Society and of the journal Attention Simone Weil, affiliated with the American Weil Society. She is currently co-editing two forthcoming volumes: Where Literature Meets Philosophy: Iris Murdoch (Palgrave Macmillan, “Iris Murdoch Today” series, 2027) and a special issue of Metaxy Journal on “Simone Weil & Art” (2027).
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
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