Iris Murdoch is best known to the world as a novelist—she wrote twenty-six—but she was a tutor in philosophy at Oxford University from 1948 until 1963 and wrote several influential essays on moral philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s. Her collection of three such essays, The Sovereignty of Good (1970), remains her most influential work. Her most sustained philosophical work is Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1993), a sprawling work ranging over an extraordinary range of topics and also a difficult work not enjoying the impact on philosophy of her earlier work. Murdoch also wrote on literature, religion, and art. Her thought is a unique appropriation of Platonic, Freudian, and existentialist themes.

Murdoch's thought emerged from, and against, British moral philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s (which she calls "linguistic philosophy"), perhaps best represented by Richard Hare's Language of Morals (though Murdoch does not mention...