Abstract

This essay explores Iris Murdoch’s unique image-based moral-philosophical methodology. Drawing on Murdoch’s early, middle, and late work, it illustrates how her early writings on metaphor and philosophical images foreshadows her later pluralist pictorial metaphysics. With this pictorial metaphysics – her wide-ranging collection of philosophical, religious or artistic images – Murdoch aims to provide us with the representations to guide and illuminate the moral life, serving as open sources for the continuous processes of moral orientation and interpretation.