«Le donne tramano qualcosa» Iris Murdoch e l’etica delle virtù

In this paper, I will highlight the role played, within the group of Oxonian philo¬sophers who revived virtue ethics beginning in the 1950s, by perhaps the most heterodox and elusive figure, Iris Murdoch. In particular, I will discuss whether Murdoch can be con¬sidered, like Anscombe and Foot, a promoter of virtue ethics, or whether points of contact with that strand are limited to the polemical goals that the philosopher and novelist shared, for a thirty-year period, with her colleagues and friends. Increasingly, important differences have led scholars to treat Murdoch as a heterodox virtue ethicist or as an advocate of an en¬tirely different theoretical framework: from Neo-Platonism, to anti-theory, to a kind of Chri¬stian Buddhism or practical mysticism. In this article, I will briefly explore some of these hy-potheses and try to show how Murdoch can be seen as the proponent of a credible virtue theory, though certainly far removed from the ‘mainstream’ Aristotelian strand.

Parole chiave:Iris Murdoch, Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, Buddhism, virtue theory

Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, «Le donne tramano qualcosa» Iris Murdoch e l’etica delle virtù in "SOCIETÀ DEGLI INDIVIDUI (LA)" 76/2023, pp 24-37, DOI: 10.3280/LAS2023-076003