[The heights of Mount Olympus. SOCRATES, PLATO, CALLISTOS, ACASTOS, IRIS MURDOCH. SOCRATES and MURDOCH are about sixty, the others about twenty.SOCRATES: So what did you all think of Iris's little book?CALLISTOS: Oh, it was wonderful! Wonderful! Such passionate, fiery exchanges! So deep, so stirring, so intellectual! I admit a lot of it went over my head--SOCRATES: When the head is as pretty as yours, dear Callistos, we will find no fault with your observations. Acastos, what did you make of it?...

Art and Eros SOCRATES Isn’t it the nature of art to explore the relation between the public and the private? Art turns us inside out, it exhibits what is secret. What goes on inwardly in the soul is the essence of each man, it’s what makes us individual people. The relation between that inwardness and public conduct is morality. How can art ignore it?--Art and ErosIn times of madness, when leaders sound like deranged poodles yipping in the dark night, there is comfort in rational discourse. T

Is the Good good because the gods approve of it, or do they approve of it because it is good? (In effect, is the Good, is morality, somehow "above" the gods?) Or is morality just attributing high falutin' notions to one's own emotional preferences and prejudices, "dressing feelings up with flowers"?There are a few good reasons to read this book: (1) you have just finished reading Plato's Dialogues and desire a light, humorous palate cleanser. (2) you have read some of Iris Murdoch's fiction and

É preciso conhecer muito bem a Filosofia socrática e platónica para escrever um (ou dois) textos deste calibre. O primeiro fez-me rir a bandeiras despregadas, tal é a inteligência da utilização dos tiques de escrita e de raciocínio de Platão, mas também a forma como ironiza o seu estilo de escrita. O segundo, pensar seriamente sobre que coisa é essa da Religião. Diria, portanto, que não é necessário conhecer bem esses textos do séc. IV a.C., mas ajuda muito para entrar neste jogo. Em todo o caso...

What is the nature of reality? Is it orderly or mere chaos? Is religion merely mythology? These are some of the questions touched upon in this short philosophic excursion by Iris Murdoch. Two Platonic dialogues for our day, written to be performed on stage, the book is a fitting addition to philosophic corpus.Better known for her novels, Murdoch was an accomplished philosopher, and this along with Fire and the Sun demonstrate her philosophic prowess. The two dialogues are connected by the questi...

Murdoch's great turn in these short dialogues is to present Plato as a mostly introverted youth who keeps to himself, scribbling everything that everyone says, divorced from the others. He is alone, broody and petulant. Throughout the plays the characters again and again describe Plato as emotional, moody and irrational. They see him as a failing poet, and a none-too-bright philosopher. Late in each dialogue Plato erupts and can hold his peace no longer. In both manic episodes Plato frantically

Some very clever writing here. When I first saw the book I thought it was rather brave of someone to be writing dialogues in this day and age, especially inviting comparisons with Plato. If reading some of the old non-Platonic dialogues has taught me nothing else it's that the genre is much harder to do well than Plato makes it appear.But what we have here are two fully functioning dialogues that work on multiple levels. There are lots of clever in-jokes for those readers who have read Plato and...

Well written platonic dialogues with many references to contemporary problems, persuasive, and concerns in them. This makes the reading fun.The conversational parties and the setup are well done. Every character has a real character that I can follow, something that the original dialogues do not evoke for me.The tentative and uncertain nature of the dialogue is so good for exploring ideas and showing the different sides of them.

The boss-type intellectual and politician advocates social realistic art to improve society and, like Marx, doesn’t want to explain the world but change it. Surely, says Acastos, there are interesting good men in literature. Name some, says Socrates. That man is the measure of all things comes from Protagoras. The sophist in the second dialogue says the gods were just ideal pictures of us. I’d go further: they were projections of the gods inside us we’re ignorant of, our own unconscious wills or...

This book contains two dialogues written as if to be performed, but I listened to the audiobook read by a single narrator and it was fine. Iris Murdorch, along with being an accomplished novelist is also a trained philosopher with a PhD and so course understands the nature of philosophy and philosophical discussion, elements that show up in many of her novels, and especially that of the relationship between master and mentee/student and teacher.These dialogues, one about the nature and role of a...

"A Dialogue About Art" and "A Dialogue about Religion." I usually find the dissection and analysis of ideas more tiring (and tiresome) than pleasurable, especially when they become abstractions divorced from any real-life correlatives. In this pair of conversations (which are actually two parts of a whole) though, Murdoch has contrived to make the interplay of ideas as interesting as the interplay of the characters she gives them to. She's such a lucid writer, with such a feel for the small char...

Iris, Iris, Iris... So you are smarter than I am. I struggled to make heads or tails of your dramatic conversations exploring art and religion. Socrates, Plato and some of their confreres, and I do mean confreres given their overt proclivities, carry on a 'stimulating' exploration. Now I have never read anything in the original Greek or Latin for that matter but their viewpoints seem remarkably modern and decidedly progressive. Can it be said that history only repeats itself as do the Greek dram...

yes i actually enjoy dialogues with socrates at the center and his "boys" bantering around him and iris murdoch's effort at capturing such a scene -- first on art and then on religion -- was well worth my time. she was one smart woman thinker.