This passage from Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960 (pg 213-214) captures something I’ve thought about a lot in relation to the reception of Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity, particularly how its sensitivity to the utterly quotidian tends to be missed by many sociological critics:
When Murdoch’s book on Sartre was published, a barber line of hers comparing Sartre’s world to Ryle’s became justly famous. The Concepts of Mind, she said, evoked a picture of a world ‘in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist party’. At the time, it seemed like a comparison much to Ryle’s disfavour; but the statement is in fact distinctly ambivalent. If something was missing from Ryle’s world, perhaps something was missing from Sartre’s, too. What sort of life would it be where we lurched from a meeting of the Free French to a secret transaction with a backstreet abortionist to violent sex in a seedy hotel but never baked a cake, looked back to a childhood birthday party or went to the circus?
(Incidentally, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how clearly Charles Taylor has stated the influence of Iris Murdoch on his thought, yet how rarely that figures in narratives of either of them)
Mark Carrigan 