ABSTRACT
In a 1959 essay in The Yale Review, Iris Murdoch wrote of the great nineteenth-century novels that they were remarkably “un-Hegelian” and “un-Romantic,” at odds with the “dominant philosophy of the age.” In his essays “The Linguistic Turn” and “Knowledge, Science and Convergence”, Bernard Williams argued that richer or “thicker” value terms, such as treachery, promise, brutality and courage, have been seen by theorists of the “linguistic turn” as containing “a factual and an evaluative element.” If William Shakespeare’s delight in manifold modes of being is as Iris Murdoch thought “the beginning of the modern world,” then our failure to delight in them might be its end. An insistence on the real presence of value in the world doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no facts; that there is no proper scientific enquiry into “how things are” in a “world that is there anyway,” independent of our perspectives.
