Murdoch on Truth and Love ed. by Gary Browning (review)

White finds unpublished and first-hand material in the Iris Murdoch Archive and successfully connects the dots between Murdoch’s reading and lecture notes (mainly on Plato, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Simone Weil, and Philippa Foot) and the evolution of her own viewpoints on justice; White then elaborates on Murdoch’s view of injustice with the support of textual analysis. Together, the essays comparing Murdoch with these two philosophers show that Murdoch offers a challenging and self-motivated way of observing life, related to but distinct from standard analytical philosophy and continental thought. Though this book is not without its flaws—for instance, its unorganized structure, some content overlap with Browning’s Why Iris Murdoch Matters (2018), an occasional digression from the book’s theme, a few typos, and the lack of a conclusion—this collection stands as a solid blueprint for future studies of Murdoch and other writers with a philosophical background.