Citation:
Date Published:
4 June 2020Abstract:
It might seem intuitive to say that attention is a matter of looking really closely at something, zeroing in on a particular object. In contrast to such an understanding of attention, it is here argued that attentive understanding of particular persons, things or events can only be apprehended by means of attending to the world in which they belong.
Iris Murdoch’s example of M and D is often described as a clear illustration of what “attention” is. I argue that the example is rather unhelpful, precisely because we get no description of the work of attention. There is, therefore, a hole in the argument. The strategy of this paper is to fill that hole by means of a reading of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Here a clear view of another person is attained by attention to the world together with unearthing one’s own prejudices — a view shared by Murdoch but missing in the reception of her thought.
March 2020: Niklas Forsberg is Head of Research at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, Department of Philosophy, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic; and Docent (≈ associate professor) in Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, and in Philosophy at University of Helsinki, Finland. A large portion of Forsberg’s research deals with problems found at the intersection between theoretical philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. He has written papers about Austin, Cavell, Coetzee, Collingwood, Emerson, Murdoch, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, discussing various topics such as pain, sin, love, language, and literature’s relation to philosophy and philosophical argumentation. He is the author of Language Lost and Found: On Iris Murdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 [pbk. 2015]).