ABSTRACT
The twentieth-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch gains insight for her conception of 'unselfish attention' from the religious and political philosopher Simone Weil. Murdoch brings 'attention' in the sense of the 'mind turned towards the good' into her own account of the human search for beauty and goodness by way of love. Broadly speaking, informed by Weil and Murdoch, the chapter argues that unselfish attention becomes pivotal for creating justice in attending to beauty and the good. A genealogy of the western concept of beauty should include the gender associated with the beautiful and the sublime at a critical moment in European culture near the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Both western philosophers and theologians would also agree that human beings have a capacity to create and to recognize, in the sense of the French reconnaitre, beauty.
