Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. by Iris Murdoch - 1953.

New Haven, CT Yale University Press, 1953. Hardcover First Edition Thus in the USA [1959], Third Printing [1961]. Hardback (NOTE: this is a Library-Rebound Paperback which now is bound in laminate boards): EX-LIBRARY, showing the usual indications thereof: Good: shows indications of considerable use. Library bookplate at front free endpaper. Heavy rubbing to the lamination. The binding is square and secure; the text show sparse pencil and pen MARGINALIA. Free of ownership names, dates, addresses, notations, inscriptions, stamps, or labels. A reading copy only. NOT a Remainder or Book-Club. 8vo. (7.95 x 5 x 0.95 inches). x, 114 pages. Weight: 8.5 ounces. Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought Series. First Edition Thus in the USA [1959], Third Printing [1961]. Hardback: Laminate Boards. Dame Iris Murdoch DBE (1919 – 1999) was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, "Under the Net", was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She studied philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1948, she became a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. She received Honorary Degrees from the University of Bath (DLitt,1983), University of Cambridge (1993), and Kingston University (1994). Her philosophical writings were influenced by Simone Weil (from whom she borrows the concept of 'attention'), and by Plato, under whose banner she professed to fight. In re-animating Plato, she gives force to the reality of the Good, and to a sense of the moral life as a pilgrimage from illusion to reality. From this perspective, Murdoch's work offers perceptive criticism of Sartre and Wittgenstein ('early' and 'late'). Her most central parable concerns a mother-in-law 'M' who works to see her daughter-in-law 'D' "justly or lovingly". The parable is partly meant to show (against Oxford contemporaries including R. M. Hare and Stuart Hampshire) the importance of the 'inner' life to moral action. Seeing another aright can depend on overcoming jealousy, and discoveries about the world involve inner work.