Abstract

Iris Murdoch makes frequent remarks that seem to identify love and knowledge. I attempt to make sense of these remarks, noting some obvious and important objections to such an identification. Pace those objections, I suggest, she is not merely committing a category confusion between an emotion and an epistemic status, or the content of a certain kind of state of mind. What Murdoch is talking about is more a matter of knowing than of knowledge: she is interested not so much in an epistemic status or an epistemic content, as in a complex of particular activities of cognitive exploring that are distinctive of a just and loving sensibility of attention. I explore some of these activities, mentioning five in particular. I note how they imply that there are special epistemic viewpoints, and wonder in closing how that admission can be reconciled with our inclination to say that if anything is knowledge, then in principle it is available to anyone to know it.