Who Killed Arnold Baffin?: Iris Murdoch and Philosophy by Literature

Iris Murdoch’s reception as a philosophical novelist rests, in part, on the attribution to the author of the opinions of Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince. That attribution goes with a curious consensus on the part of critics that, despite his conviction, the critic Bradley Pearson did not kill the author, Arnold Baffin. Confronting Martha Nussbaum, Peter Lamarque, and Peter J. Conradi, I vindicate the simple reader’s view: Bradley did kill Arnold, Bradley’s opinions are not Murdoch’s, and The Black Prince is not a work of philosophy. It might nevertheless contain a joke about Roland Barthes.