Language Lost and Found On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse

Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular.

Niklas Forsberg is Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has previously written on Wittgenstein, Cavell, Murdoch, Austin and Derrida.

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
Apparent Paradoxes
1.1 The Received View and its Complications 24
1.2 Approaching “The Black Prince” 36
1.3 Localizing Murdoch 52
1.4 A Fatty Pâté and a Plateful of Cherries: On Nussbaum (on Literature) 64
1.5. The Commonplaceness of the Approach 75
1.6 Preparatory Summary: The Appearance of Paradox 90

Chapter 2
How to Make a Mirror
2.1 Murdoch on Art and Literature and Love 94
2.2 What is a Mirror? 128
2.3 Wittgenstein and the Difficulty of Acknowledging Illusions of Sense 135
2.4 Kierkegaard and Grammatical Illusions 144
2.5 Mirroring Illusions: The Thought of the Indirect Communication 152
2.6 Inheriting Wittgenstein (and Kierkegaard) 161

Chapter 3
Sensing a Sense Lost
3.1 Loss of Concepts, Loss of Questions 191
3.2 Contrasting Pictures of the Human 215
3.3 Vision over Choice 230
3.4 Making Pictures (Perfectionism and Vision) 235

Chapter 4
Reading The Black Prince
4.1 “Murdoch's Most Self-Consciously Platonic Kierkegaardian Love Story” 257
4.2 In the Context of Bradley Pearson's Form of Life 269
4.3 Passing Verdict: Who did it? 302
4.4 In Disagreement with Oneself: A Failure to Mean 310

Chapter 5
What is it Like to Be a Corpse?
5.1 Introduction: Running Out of Arguments? 318
5.2 Costello's Speechlessness and Diamond's Concerns 321
5.3 The Exemplary Bat 334
5.4 Understanding Deflection 343
5.5 Concluding Remarks 355

Chapter 6
Smashing Mirrors, Collecting the Pieces, Returning Our Words
6.1 The Concept of a Concept and the Loss of Concepts 358
6.2 Smashing Mirrors, Returning to the Ordinary 371
6.3 Literature, Distance and the Return of Our Words 376


Bibliography 389