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Conversations, controversies and outright wars between the sciences and the humanities over the ingredients for a "Good Society" have often taken centre-stage in twentieth-century disciplinary debates. This has been especially the case since the two cultures conflict involving the scientist, novelist and technocrat C.P. Snow, and the literary critic and cultural theorist F.R. Leavis. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to Iris Murdoch's specific response to the Snow—Leavis exchange, nor, indeed, to her elaborate and considered view of its implications for how we think through our own humanity and historical moment. Yet Snow, Murdoch and Leavis engage with a common model of scientific knowledge, one that Murdoch continues to challenge throughout her career. It was originally forged in Cambridge by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, during the heyday of the New Realism, somewhere between the early years of the century and the late 1920s. The work of the Cambridge Realists privileged logic and mathematical physics as the foundation of all knowledge and established the movement of logical empiricism which fathered the more stringently anti-metaphysical schools of logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy and the basic methods of analytical philosophy. But the years between 1910 and 1930 were also those of literary high modernism, of course, and though Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Cambridge Realists has been well documented, Murdoch's lifelong interest in how the sciences and the philosophy of science of the first half of the twentieth century had come to shape an entire culture, has received relatively little attention.¹

DOI: 10.1057/9781137271365_4

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